Quotes · Skopia

10 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Place·Schleswig-Holstein✕clear

Beauty can pierce one like a pain.

Buddenbrooks · 1901

★ 6.9

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century beings it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

The Magic Mountain · 1924

★ 6.0

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

The Magic Mountain · 1924

★ 5.2

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

The Magic Mountain · 1924

★ 3.5

And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting we say is long. We might just as well-or more accurately-say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such.

1924

★ 3.5

Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.

Lotte in Weimar · 1939

★ 3.4

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

The Magic Mountain · 1924

★ 1.9

We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experiences of our life. But the beginning and end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely in the category of objective events, and that's that.

The Magic Mountain · 1924

★ 1.8

For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once.

The Magic Mountain · 1924

★ 1.8

Scientific literature

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it... An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul.

1936

★ 1.8