Top 15 E. T. A. Hoffmann Quotes

Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?

Let me ask you outright, gentle reader, if there have not been hours, indeed whole days and weeks of your life, during which all your usual activities were painfully repugnant, and everything you believed in and valued seemed foolish and worthless?

There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.

"Perhaps, too, you will then believe that nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life, and that all that a writer can do is to present it as "in a glass, darkly"."

I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps.

It is only in the morning that one should marry, read unfavourable reviews, make one's will, beat one's servants, and so forth.

"So stark ist der Zauber der Musik und, immer mächtiger werdend, musste er jede Fessel einer andern Kunst zerreißen."

(Beethovens Instrumentalmusik)

Oh, where have you gone, you blissful dreams of future happiness

But if, like a bold painter, you had first sketched in a few audacious strokes the outline of the picture you had in your own soul, you would then easily have been able to deepen and intensify the colors one after the other, until the varied throng of living figures carried your friends away and they, like you, saw themselves in the midst of the scene that had proceeded out of your own soul.

If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils
within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of
peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I
say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of
ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is
only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room
which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a
mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy
of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to
follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark
power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection
of ourselves.

None but a poet can understand a poet; none but a romantic spirit transported with poetry and consecrated in the Holy of Holies an comprehend what the ordained utters out of his inspiration.

Wer kann es sagen, wer nur ahnen, wie weit das Geistesvermögen der Tiere geht!

So Marie couldn't talk to anyone about her adventures, but the idea of that wonderful fairyland lingered on. She thought she heard murmurs of sweet sound, she saw it all again the moment she let her mind dwell on it, and so it was that instead of playing as usual she could sit still, never moving but deep in her own thoughts, with the result that she was scolded for being a little dreamer.

It is the phantom of our own self whose deep affinity and profound influence on our state of mind either damns us to hell or uplifts us into heaven.

The whole day, the whole night –nothing but the thought of her.