Top 15 Friedrich Hölderlin Quotes

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.

But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.

You have a head and a heart? Reveal only one of them, I say; If you reveal both at once, doubly they'll damn you, for both.

Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen ist alles. (We are nothing; what we search for is everything.)

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

when i was a boy
a god often rescued me
from the shouts and the rods of men
and i played among trees and flowers
secure in their kindness
and the breezes of heaven
were playing there too.

and as you delight
the hearts of plants
when they stretch towards you
with little strength

so you delighted the heart in me
father Helios, and like Endymion
i was your favourite,
Moon. o all

you friendly
and faithful gods
i wish you could know
how my soul has loved you.

even though when i called to you then
it was not yet with names, and you
never named me as people do
as though they knew one another

i knew you better
than i have ever known them.
i understood the stillness above the sky
but never the words of men.

trees were my teachers
melodious trees
and i learned to love
among flowers.

i grew up in the arms of the gods.

Isn’t everything alive already in your blood?

Why do you like me more when I was prouder and wilder, more full of words, yet emptier?

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

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

I am mortal, born to love and to suffer.

Then and Now In younger days each morning I rose with joy, To weep at nightfall; now, in my later years, Though doubting I begin my day, yet Always its end is serene and holy.

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.

I grew up in the arms of the gods.

"To the Parcae"

A single summer grant me, great powers, and
a single autumn for fully ripened song
that, sated with the sweetness of my
playing, my heart may more willingly die.
The soul that, living, did not attain its divine
right cannot repose in the nether world.
But once what I am bent on, what is
holy, my poetry, is accomplished:
Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows’ world!
I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not
accompany me down there. Once I
lived like the gods, and more is not needed.