Friedrich Hölderlin Quotes

Man kann auch in die Höhe fallen, so wie in die Tiefe.

What love and spirit give cannot be extorted. The state has always been made a hell by man's wanting to make it his heaven. The state is nothing but the coarse husk around the seed of life, the wall around the human fruits and flowers. Yet what good is a wall when the soil of our garden is parched? ... O inspiration, you will bring us the springtime of peoples again. The state cannot command your presence, but if it does not obstruct you, you will come.

La poesía es aquello que escapa de la historicidad, lo que no puede explicarse mediante un discurso histórico razonable y sin embargo mantiene su significado a través de la historia.

Near and hard
to grasp
Is the God.
But where danger is
Deliverance also grows

in the union of nature, loyalty is no dream! We part only to be more intimately at one, more divinely at peace with all, with each other. We die so as to live.

On this height I often stand, my Bellarmin! But a moment of reflection casts me down. I begin to think, and find myself as I was before, alone, with all the pains of mortality, and my heart’s sanctuary, the world's eternal oneness, is no more; nature’s arms are closed, and I stand before her like a stranger and cannot comprehend her.
Oh! had I never gone into your schools. It’s learning that lured me down into the pit, in my youthful folly I thought to find in it the proof of my pure joy, and it has ruined everything for me.
Amongst you I became so very rational, learnt to distinguish myself perfectly from what is around me, and now I’m set apart in the beautiful world, expelled from the garden of nature in which I grew and bloomed, and shrivel under the noonday sun.

¿Qué son los siglos, comparados a ese instante en que dos seres se adivinan y se acercan?

Still you think yourself lonely; in the silence of night
Your lament is heard by the stone, and flees from you often
To wail away from mortals on a wingéd wave to heaven.
Because the precious favorites never lived with you,
Who worshiped you, who once made stunning temples and cities
To wreathe your shores, and always searched and always missed,
For the wreath will always need its heroes, the consecrated ones
Glorified to eminence in the hearts of sensitive men.

Tell me, then, where is Athens? Above the urns of the masters
Is the most beloved of your cities, on the sacred shores,
In mourning for God, and collapsed completely into ashes,
Or is there still an indication from her that the skipper,
When he arrives, perhaps he will remember her and call?
In the columns that rose upward there, did nothing shine
Below but the figurines of God on castle rooftops?
Didn't people's voices, vociferous and wild, rustle
Through the agora, and rush away through the gateways of joy
Along the narrow lanes and down to the holiest of harbors?
.
.
.
Alas! It wanders in the night, it dwells as in Orcus,
With nothing godlike, our race. To their own bustle
Alone they are fastened, and in the raging workshop
Each hears only himself, and the wild ones with mighty arms
Work much without respite; yet ever more
Sterile, like the Furies, remains the toil of the poor.

You have lost faith in anything great; you are doomed, then, doomed to perish unless that faith returns, like a comet from unknown skies.

Sólo en el niño reside la libertad.

Eagles live in the darkness,
And the sons of the Alps
Cross over the abyss without fear
On lightly-built bridges.
***
Growing weak on the separate mountains — Then give us calm waters;
Give us wings, and loyal minds
To cross over and return.

What is the wisdom of a book compared with the wisdom of an angel?

But the sower Loves to see a woman Fallen asleep in the daytime Over a half-knitted stocking.

I grew up in the arms of the gods.

Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch.