Hermann Bahr > Quotes

“So he explored, explored within himself, scanning himself with a lamp, as if it were not himself at all but some strange monster that he had been commanded to guard.”
― Hermann Bahr

“It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.”
― Hermann Bahr

“As long as he deceived himself about the truth, he could blame fortune and have confidence in the future. Now the clouds of madness were closing round his mind.”
― Hermann Bahr

“Words are not in the power of men; men are in the power of words. Every time we open our mouths, a thousand dead men speak through us.”
― Hermann Bahr

“Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.”
― Hermann Bahr

“Bondage And Service - that was what they all demanded and from everyone. This craving to find themselves in another, to subjugate and appropriate foreign territory, to create a new field for their own will in a second body, foreign flesh for their own soul; this greedy, consuming hunger devoured every other desire, and they called it friendship!”
― Hermann Bahr

“... what we say or do is unimportant; it is merely semblance, beyond which our real life lies concealed... We know this better than we can prove, but in order to prove it we have to express it, and on the path to speech the essential somehow gets lost.”
― Hermann Bahr

“Elsewhere the descendent has an easy task in entering the heritage of the fathers because it contains a single will and a uniform sense. In us, however, shout a hundred voices of the past, the struggle of the fathers is not settled, each must decide it anew, each must choose among his fathers, each must for himself pass through the entire past again. For the past of our men has this in particular, that none of them was ever closed, nothing was fought out, the father recedes before his son, but in the grandson he goes ahead again, nobody is or feels secure, each feels him- self divided, our men have too much inborn. Elsewhere one can confidently follow his fathers, we cannot do this because our fathers, disunited among themselves, make an appeal to our judgment. Je ne puis vivre que selon mes morts, ("I can only live according to my dead ones."), Barrès said. But we cannot live according to our dead ones because we would be torn apart since each of our dead ones tears in an opposite direction.”
― Hermann Bahr, Dalmatinische Reise (Classic Reprint)