The World Of Yesterday Quotes
"Nothing is further from my mind than to bring myself to the fore, unless in the sense of being the presenter of a lecture illustrated by slides."
"The homeless, more than anyone, are free in a new way, and only those with no more ties can afford to cast consideration to the winds."
"We have all, even the least of us, known the turmoil of almost constant volcanic shocks suffered by our native continent of Europe."
"The true desire of a Jew, his inbuilt ideal, is to rise to a higher social plane by becoming an intellectual."
"But our fathers drowsed their lives away remote from all true bitterness, from the malice and force of destiny; they knew nothing beyond themselves."
"For they drowsed their lives away remote from all true bitterness, from the malice and force of destiny; they knew nothing beyond themselves."
"Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears."
"For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself."
"We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers."
"Life was worth living only with such security, and wider and wider circles were eager to have their part in that valuable asset."
"Young people discover poets for themselves because they want to discover them."
"In just the same way as when you were a schoolboy yourself, in your provincial town, you got hold of the poems of Mallarmé, who was no better known at the time, nor part of the accepted literary canon."
"We found what was new because that was what we wanted, because we were hungry for something that belonged to us alone—not to the world of our fathers, not our environment."
"Young people, like certain animals, have an excellent instinct for changes in the weather."
"It was taken for granted that names not honoured by the general public until a decade later were current among us."
"At seventeen, I had not only read all the poems of Baudelaire and Walt Whitman, I knew most of them by heart."
"The most vigilant mind of the later German generation, Hermann Bahr, lived in Vienna."
"We were the vanguard, the shock troops promoting every kind of new art just because it was new."
"In our fathers’ generation a poet or musician was esteemed only when he had ‘proved himself’, adjusting to the worthy tastes of bourgeois society."
"A single young man who reached hitherto unattainable heights at the first bold attempt always, merely by dint of his success, encourages all the young people around him and following him."
"For in those long-distant days in Austria there was still a special, romantic aura about university."
"Medieval scholars were not subject to the ordinary civil courts."
"Academics in the rest of Europe lost this privileged position."
"A German student set particular store by a specific kind of ‘student honour’."
"To be considered a real student you had to have proved your courage."
"We saw individual freedom as the greatest good."
"Membership of a duelling fraternity ensured a young man the patronage of its former members."
"I had long ago given my heart to literature."
"Good books are a substitute for the best university."
"I could read what I liked and work on what I liked, without having to account to anyone for it."
"I am convinced to this day that one can become an excellent philosopher, historian, literary philologist, lawyer, or anything else without ever having gone to university."
"The cloud of academic exams did not yet loom on the bright horizon."
"The city offers itself to everyone, although no one can fathom it entirely."
"The history of France spoke from every stone here."
"They wrote their books by hand as writers did a thousand years ago."
"Paris accommodated everyone side by side; there was no above and below."
"Nothing was stiffly formal. It was easy to meet women and easy to part with them again."
"I felt as if I were still a schoolboy and had been told to move two classes lower down."
"The real criterion of my choice was not what subject most appealed to me in itself, but which would burden me least."
"But the examination was not made difficult for me."
"Stillness, so to speak, formed around him wherever he went and wherever he was."
"He avoided any kind of fuss and even his own fame—that 'sum of all the misunderstandings gathering around his name'."
"It was difficult to get in touch with Rilke. He had no house, no address where he could be visited."
"To his extremely sensitive and impressionable mind, any firm decision, any plan or advance announcement was too much of a burden."
"Every movement and every gesture of his was gentle, and even when he laughed, it was a sound that merely hinted at laughter."
"Order, cleanliness and silence were real physical necessities to him."
"He could not bear vulgarity of any kind, and although he lived in straitened circumstances, he always dressed with the utmost care, cleanliness and good taste."
"His clothing itself was a masterpiece of well thought-out and carefully composed discretion."
"He never, even in the most hastily written note, allowed himself to cross out a word."
"After a conversation of any length with him you were incapable of any kind of vulgarity for hours, even days."
"I think that few could boast of having been 'friends' with Rilke."
"With his extraordinary sensitivity, he could not bear to let anyone or anything come too close to him."
"The distinctive quality of his restraint became obvious only when you knew him more closely."
"Forty years of peace had strengthened national economies, technology had speeded up the pace of life, scientific discoveries had been a source of pride to the spirit of our own generation."
"Europe had never been stronger, richer or more beautiful, had never believed more fervently in an even better future."
"People had discovered that up in the mountains winter, once a dismal season to be spent gloomily playing cards in taverns or feeling bored as you sat around in overheated rooms, was a source of filtered sunlight, nectar for the lungs that sent blood coursing deliciously just beneath the skin."
"The young see war as a constant possibility to be expected almost daily."
"For the first time, you saw young girls enjoying excursions and sporting activities in open and confident friendship with young men, and without a governess going along as chaperone."
"Increasingly, the wooden partitions in swimming baths that used to divide the gentlemen’s and ladies’ pools from each other were taken down."
"For the air around us is not a dead and empty void, it has in it the rhythm and vibration of the time."
"Perhaps, ungrateful as human beings are, we did not realise at the time how strongly and securely the wave bore us up."
"The world was moving to a different rhythm. A year—so much could happen in a year now!"
"The stormy wind of pride and confidence sweeping over Europe brought clouds with it."
"The worst of it was that the very thing we loved most, our common optimism, betrayed us."
"War cannot be conducted with reason and proper feeling."
"War was a legend, and its distance in time from them made it seem heroic and romantic."
"Every conversation ended either in such stupid phrases as, 'If you don’t know how to hate then you don’t know how to love properly either', or in outright suspicion."
"For this was something on the credit side that distinguished the First World War from the Second—words were still powerful then."
"In 1939 no writer’s expression of opinion had any effect at all, either for better or worse."
"The moral conscience of the world was not yet as exhausted and drained as it is today."
"Thanks to an outburst of universal moral indignation, the execution by firing squad of Nurse Cavell did Germany more harm than losing a battle."
"The spontaneous manifesto of a great writer had an effect a thousand times greater than all the statesmen’s official speeches."
"But as the military men also knew that writers were figures of authority, they themselves tried to recruit men of high moral and intellectual prestige for their own ends."
"Rolland did not see it as any task of his to heat the already sultry and overcharged atmosphere any further, but instead to cleanse it."
"Anyone reading that famous essay Au-dessus de la mêlée now will probably be unable to understand its immense influence at the time."
"But as usual the outcry proved that the full weight of the blow had gone home."
"For much as I love his published works, I think it is possible that later his letters will be considered the finest and most humane utterances of his great heart and passionate intellect."
"Gradually, the plan of a book began to take shape in my mind."
"I had sworn to myself—an oath that I kept after 1940 as well—never to write a word approving of the war or denigrating any other nation."
"I was able to write enthusiastic praise of Bertha von Suttner, the founder of the pacifist movement, who denounced war as the worst of all crimes."
"But I was alone among my friends with these warnings."
"I wanted to show that a man despised as weak and fearful in a time of enthusiastic feeling is generally the only one who, when defeat comes, not only endures but rises above it."
"Now, for the first time, I had the feeling that I was really speaking for myself and for my times."
"I never thought humanity capable of such a crime."
"The ladies and gentleman casually parading in that carefree way were not the guilty ones, the guilty were those using words to stir up bellicose feeling."
"Now I really did feel a powerful urge to do something against the war!"
"Every foray down to the city was a distressing experience at the time."
"Bread was nothing but black crumbs tasting of pitch and glue."
"Most people trapped rabbits so as not to forget the taste of meat entirely."
"The only fabric on sale was treated paper, a substitute for a substitute."
"Country people on the plain were better off for food."
"The neighbour states had replaced the old Austrian banknotes with their own currencies."
"The flywheel of the mechanism kept on turning in the same old rhythm."
"Art was never more popular in Austria than at that time of chaos."
"I will never forget what operatic performances were like in those days of our greatest need."
"But radical upheaval was averted only outwardly and in the political sense."
"Something had been crushed along with the armies—a belief in the infallibility of those authorities."
"A whole young generation looked bitterly and scornfully at their fathers."
"The post-war generation emancipated itself, with a sudden, violent reaction, from all that had previously been accepted."
"Remember that the people who talk to you are not usually saying what they want to say, only what they are allowed to tell you."