Gustav Meyrink > Quotes

“The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line. It is the same with all creatures. How could a chicken that is artificially hatched in an incubator immediately look for the right food, if the experience of millions of years were not stored inside it? The existence of 'instinct' indicates the presence of our ancestors in our bodies and in our souls.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“Nothing essential happens through death, only through birth and that is the whole trouble - But shouldn't we be speaking of something more important than life and death?”
― Gustav Meyrink, Angel of the West Window

“I have not let myself be stultified by science, whose highest goal is to furnish a `waiting room', which it would be best to tear down.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“Prague does not have its name for no reason - in truth,
Prague is a threshold between the life on Earth
and Heaven, a threshold much thinner and narrower then in any other places…”
― Gustav Meyrink

“The world we live in is a world of effects; the realm of true causes is hidden. If we should ever discover it we would be able to perform magic.”
― Gustav Meyrink,

“A brief rustling that broke off short, as if startled at itself, then deadly silence, that agonising, watchful hush, fraught with its own betrayal, that stretched each minute to an excruciating eternity.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“¨You ask me, how was it to come to pass that I, despite the detachment I have achieved from the web of life, could be transformed overnight into a sexual murderer? I will tell you. Human beings are like glass tubes, through which many colored balls may roll. Most men are restricted to one color only. Should the ball be red, the man is branded as ¨bad¨; if yellow, then he is ¨good.¨ Should two balls pursue their passage through the same tube, one yellow and one red, then the man has an ¨unstable character.¨ But we, who have been ¨bitten by the Serpent of the Kingdom of the spirit,¨ compress into one life the experiences of a whole race within an age: colored balls rush wildly after one another on their way through the glass tube, and when it ends, then we are prophets, and the very mirror of God himself. -- Gustave Meyrink, Der Golem”
― Gustave Meyrink

“the longing for wisdom itself is wisdom' - 'search for a fixed point within yourself, my child, that the world cannot reach' - regard everything that happens as a lifeless painting and do not let yourself be touched by it,”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Dedalus / Ariadne Book of Austrian Fantasy: The Meyrink Years, 1890-1930

“Las causas no podemos reconocerlas nunca, todo lo que percibimos son los efectos. Lo que identificamos como causa en realidad no es más que un… presagio. Si suelto este lápiz, se caerá al suelo. Que el hecho de soltarlo constituya la causa de la caída puede creerlo un estudiante, pero yo no. Soltarlo es sencillamente el presagio infalible de la caída.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

“Each thing in earth is nothing but an eternal symbol clothed in dust.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“Everyone says its a myth until one day something happens in the streets that brings it back to life.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“There is nothing mysterious about it at all. It is only magic and sorcery--kishuf--that frighten men; life itches and burns like a hairshirt, but the rays from the sun of the spiritual world are mild and warming.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“All around were people such as the eternal petty bourgeois of all lands eyes with the instinctive hatred of the bandy-legged mongrel for a thoroughbred, beings that will ever remain a mystery to the masses, arousing both contempt and envy, creatures that can wade through blood without batting an eyelid and yet swoon at the screech of a fork across a plate, who will pull out a revolver at the slightest suggestion of a sneer yet calmly smile when caught cheating at cards, for whom vices, the very thought of which makes the ordinary citizen shudder, are commonplace and who would rather go thirsty for days than drink out of a glass another has used, who accept God as a matter of course and yet shut themselves off from Him because they find Him boring, who are considered hollow by people who crudely assume that what, in the course of generations, has become the essence of such creatures, is mere veneer and outward show; they are neither hollow nor the opposite, they are beings who have lost their souls and have therefore become the incarnation of evil for the multitude which will never possess a soul, they are aristocrats who would rather die than crawl to anyone, who, with unerring instinct, spot the plebeian within their fellow-man
and place him lower than the animals and yet fall down before him if he happens to be sitting on the throne, they are lords of the earth who can become helpless as a child at the slightest frown on the face of destiny, instruments of the Devil and at the same time his plaything.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

“You told me that a doctor used hypnotism to treat you, with the result that for a long time you lost the memory of your childhood and youth", he continued. "That is the characteristic—the stigma—of all those who have been 'bitten by the snake of the spiritual realm'. It seems almost as if, inside us, one life has to be grafted onto another, as a scion is grafted onto a wild tree, before the miracle of awakening can occur. The separation that usually comes with death is in our case achieved by erasing the memory, sometimes just by a sudden spiritual about-turn.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“Shouldn't we be speaking of something more important than life and death?”
― Gustav Meyrink, Angel of the West Window

“Воистину, труднее смертному вечную улыбку обрящить, нежели, перерыв несметное множество могил, сыскать череп, коий носил на плечах в своей прежней жизни..”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

“Whoever would rise, must first descend, for only then can the bottommost rise to the top.”
― Gustav Meyrink, Angel of the West Window

“Разве не может быть, что невидимый, непостижимый «ветер» бросает и нас то туда, то сюда, определяя наши поступки, тогда как мы, в нашем простодушии, полагаем, что мы действуем по своей свободной воле? Что если жизнь в нас не что иное, как таинственный вихрь?!”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“...the face before him was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was smooth, with a black strip of cloth tied over its forehead, and yet it was deeply furrowed, like the sea, that can have tall waves but not a wrinkle on the surface. The eyes were like dark chasms and yet they were the eyes of a human being and not empty sockets. The skin was a greenish olive colour and looked as if it were made of bronze...”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

“[...] verzeihen Sie, daß ich so furchtbar gescheit daherrede, aber wenn man an der Universität ist, kommt einem eine Menge vertrottelter Bücher unter die Hände; unwillkürlich verfällt man dann in eine deppenhafte Ausdrucksweise.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“¿No es posible que haya un "viento" incomprensible e invisible que nos llevara de un lado para otro, y determinara nuestras acciones, mientras que nosotros, en nuestra simpleza, creemos vivir bajo nuestra propia y libre voluntad?”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“Buchstaben zu empfinden, sie nicht nur mit den Augen in Büchern zu lesen, - einen Dolmetsch in mir selbst aufzustellen, der mir übersetzt, was die Instinkte ohne Worte raunen, darin muß der Schlüssel liegen, sich mit dem eigenen Innern durch klare Sprache zu verständigen, begriff ich.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“Сильные обходятся без религии - они идут свободно и посох им уже не нужен; тем, для кого все на свете сводится лишь к пище и питью, религия тоже ни к чему - они еще не испытывают в ней нужды. Зачем посох, если ты никуда не идешь, а только топчешься на месте?”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

“In every name there is a hidden force and when we repeat that name over and over we draw into our blood that spiritual force, which in time, finally transforms our whole body.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

“Life is generous; at every instant it gives us a new beginning. Every second we are confronted by the question: "Who am I?" We do not ask it, and this is why we do not find the beginning”
― Gustav Meyrink

“Depuis une éternité j'étais rongé par un tourment opaque - une espèce de conviction floue qu'on m'avait pris quelque chose et que j'avais cheminé comme un somnambule pendant une partie de mon existence au bord d'un abîme sans fond. Et jamais je n'étais parvenu à en élucider l'origine.”
― Gustav Meyrink, Le Golem

“De pronto comprendí en lo más profundo de su ser a esas criaturas misteriosas que viven a mi alrededor: Se mueven sin voluntad por su existencia, agitadas por una corriente magnética invisible igual que hace un momento flotaba el ramo de novia, arrastrado por el arroyo de mugre.”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

“Be awake in all that you do! Do not think you are already awake. No:
you are asleep and dreaming.

Be firm, collect yourself, and briefly behold the sensation that runs
through your body: "NOW I AM AWAKE!”
― Gustav Meyrink

“Even if I were to succeed in forcing my way into that locked 'room', would that not just mean I would once again fall prey to the ghosts that have been locked away in it?”
― Gustav Meyrink, The Golem