Friedrich Hölderlin Quotes

Las delicias de este mundo ya he gozado,
Los días de mi juventud hace tanto, ¡tanto!, que se desvanecieron,
Abril y Mayo y Julio están lejanos,
¡Ya nada soy, ya nada me complace!

O sacred light, walking there upon us, restlessly potent in its tremendous realm, disclosing its soul to me as well, in the rays that I drink, your luck be mine! From their deeds the sons of the sun nourish themselves; they live by victory; with own spirit they rouse themselves, and their force is their mirth.

Ja, vergiß nur, daß es Menschen gibt, darbendes, angefochtenes, tausendfach geärgertes Herz! und kehre wieder dahin, wo du ausgingst, in die Arme der Natur, der wandellosen, stillen und schönen.

For our generation walks as in Hades, without the divine.

Sometimes his genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart. But mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously

Wherein lies the danger, grows also the saving power.

"Hölderlin's sense of loss and destitution was not simply due to a personal predilection for suffering, but was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that arose from powerful currents seething under the Enlightenment — an increasing alienation from nature and a growing sense of disenchantment in the face of a triumphant rationality and waning traditions and values. Hölderlin was not alone in perceiving these changes and experiencing them deeply. Hegel, for example, famously wrote of alienated consciousness, and Schiller described modern human beings as "stunted plants, that show only a feeble vestige of their nature." Hölderlin, for his part, reacted to these currents with an almost overwhelming longing for lost wholeness."

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

These fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,
Cooked and sampled here on earth.

close and difficult to realize is the god, but where danger abounds, grows what saves.

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

But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come,
And what I saw, the hallowed, my word shall convey,
For she, she herself, who is older than the ages
And higher than the gods of Orient and Occident,
Nature has now awoken amid the clang of arms,
And from high Aether down to the low abyss,
According to fixed law, begotten, as in the past, on holy Chaos,
Delight, the all-creative,
Delights in self-renewal.

What you seek is close by and rises to meet you.

Too long now things divine have been cheaply used
And all the power of heaven, the kindly, spent
In trifling waste by cold and cunning
Men without thanks, who when he, the Highest,

In person tills their field for them, think they know
the daylight and the Thunderer, and indeed
Their telescope may find them all, may
Count and may name every star of heaven.

Yet will the Father cover with holy night,
That we may last on earth, our too knowing eyes.
. . . Never will our
Free-ranging power coerce his heaven.

From “The Poet’s Vocation” (“Dichterberuf”)

Holy spirits, you walk up there
in the light, on soft earth.
Shining god-like breezes
touch upon you gently,
as a woman's fingers
play music on holy strings.

Like sleeping infants the gods
breathe without any plan;
the spirit flourishes continually
in them, chastely kept,
as in a small bud,
and their holy eyes
look out in still
eternal clearness.

A place to rest
isn't given to us.
Suffering humans
decline and blindly fall
from one hour to the next,
like water thrown
from cliff to cliff,
year after year,
down into the Unknown.