“We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter toward its doom. And at the same time the thought abruptly shot through me, with a joyful, startled amazement, that despite the decay and death of that language it had not been lost, that its youth, maturity, and downfall were preserved in our memory, in our knowledge of it and its history, and would survive and could at any time be reconstructed in the symbols and formulas of scholarship as well as in the recondite formulations of the Glass Bead Game. I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

— Hermann Hesse , book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in t…" by Hermann Hesse?

Hermann Hesse 168

German writer 1877–1962

Related quotes

“The irony is we thought we were behind the curve, that the industry had already peaked, and we were just trying to catch up.”

Sid Meier (1954) Canadian-American game programmer and designer

http://www.gamespot.com/features/sidlegacy/interview.html

“The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering… and I was reaping what I had not sown… None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 208
Context: The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had not, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.

“there were these people
on the ground,
they were reaching up their
arms and trying to pull me
down
but
they couldn't do
it.

I felt like pissing on
them.
they were so
jealous.
all they had to do was
to work their way
slowly up to it
as I had
done.

such people think
success grows on
trees.

you and I,
we know
better.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

"transport"
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)

“What other paths were there? His studies had shown him that revolution and evolution were the only ways that societies ever truly changed. Revolution and evolution, built of a mix of education and violence and politics and compromise and self-interest and self-preservation. Certainly, history showed that rigid societies, like ancient dinosaurs, always died. The Confed was the biggest dinosaur ever, and while it was already dying and had been doing so for a long time, it would take many years before it finally fell. Any empire which had to hold its citizens in check with military force was far down the road to destruction. Which brought up another thought: what would replace the dead beast when it began to rot? What parasite would emerge from the corpse to try and breed itself into superiority?”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 132)

“From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 327)

“It was obvious there would be no return to "normality." The economy wouldn't be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 24

“Organizations are complex and paradoxical phenomena that can be understood in many different ways. Many of our taken-for-granted ideas about organizations are metaphorical, even though we may not recognize them as such. For example, we frequently talk about organizations as if they were machines designed to achieve predetermined goals and objectives, and which should operate smoothly and efficiently. And as a result of this kind of thinking, we often attempt to organize and manage them in a mechanistic way, forcing their human qualities into a background role. By using different metaphors to understand the complex and paradoxical character of organizational life, we are able to manage and design organizations in ways that we may not have thought possible before.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 13; Cited in: Morgen Witzel (2011) Fifty key figures management, p. 205

“I think learning about women coders is absolutely important. It’s part of our history. There’s so much in this world that we don’t cover, and I think it’s so important to know that these amazing, incredible, intelligent women were severely over looked…because they were women.”

Chanelle Peloso (1994) Canadian actress

The Bletchley Circle : San Francisco | Interview with Chanelle Peloso as Hailey Yarner https://www.bradfordzone.co.uk/the-bletchley-circle-san-francisco-interview-with-chanelle-peloso-as-hailey-yarner/ (19 July 2018)

“And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

54 min 55 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Journeys in Space and Time [Episode 8]
Context: Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.

“The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. [on followup] No, not our nation's, but in World War II. I mean, we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century, but in this century's history.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Press conference (15 September 1988), paraphrased in Esquire (August 1992), The New Yorker (10 October 1988), p. 102

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Hermann Hesse 168

Related quotes

Related topics