“At home these men’s works [ Kant, Schiller, Goethe] were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa’s study, and Törless knew this bookcase was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor. It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about.”
as translated by E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (1955), p. 115
Young Törless (1966)
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Robert Musil 21
Austrian writer 1880–1942Related quotes
“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”
‘About Books, Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling’, New York Times, February 22, 1987.
Source: The Summing Up (1938), Ch. 5, p. 12 http://books.google.com/books?id=2hNbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22There+is+only+one+thing+about+which+I+am+certain+and+this+is%22&pg=PA12#v=onepage- 13 http://books.google.com/books?id=2hNbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22that+there+is+very+little+about+which+one+can+be+certain%22&pg=PA13#v=onepage
“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”
Source: The Waves
“A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.”
Source: The Long Fall
Entry (1955)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
"Self-Portrait" (1936), p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1UxYzuI2oQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false
1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950)
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.
“I call them by familiar names,
As one by one draws nigh.”
Poems (1869), A Strip of Blue (1870)
Context: Sometimes they seem like living shapes, —
The people of the sky, —
Guests in white raiment coming down
From heaven, which is close by;
I call them by familiar names,
As one by one draws nigh.
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.10