Glass Bead Game Quotes

“And they didn't like to pay with trust and love, but rather with money and goods. They betrayed each other and expected being betrayed themselves.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“Note 54.
I have often pondered whether Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game painted, perhaps not fully consciously, a good picture of what this new world could look like: a small and poor cultural en intellectual elite living in a secluded 'Castalia,' but that performed the glass bead game - an abstract synthesis of the arts and science -to tie together and give meaning to existence as well as the world as a whole. Remember that Castalia has a diplomatic wing whose role is to negotiate with the outside world to keep its funding. Of course Knecht leaves in the end, but there is one way of reading his ultimate drowning as a sacrifice so that the overman - Tito - can live.”
― Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche's Great Politics

“The AC was all about bringing all great subjects together. The AC wasn’t some dreary, stuffy set of academic tomes. The books were written in letters of fire. The pages burned. Smoke rose from the covers. These were polemics and artworks and extravaganzas in soaring rhetoric. They were assassinations, denunciations, and deconstructions. They were about martyrs, saints and sinners, angels and demons. They were incendiary. They were dynamite. They blew up everything. Shouldn’t books be detonations? We must not have the blind leading the blind and the bland leading the bland. We must cross the rivers of hell, and swear our most solemn oaths over the black waters of the Styx.”
― David Sinclair, Without the Mob, There Is No Circus