Hermann Broch Quotes

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Like sin itself, Satan appeals to the senses. He originated and perfected the art of disguising evil as good.

As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.

You will say these are very small sins... [But] it does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts

Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.

That which is evil is soon learned.

To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A man is right when there is no wrong in him. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature — the wrongness in him — the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

Man is not born wicked; he becomes so, as he becomes sick.

An evil intention perverts the best actions, and makes them sins.

Unbelief is the mother of vice; it is the parent of sin; and, therefore, I say it is a pestilent evil-a master sin.

Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.

In one way, we're on an upward swing, but at the same time there's still a lot of evil that goes on in the world. I think it's definitely heading in a better direction, but it seems to take so long for all the people with the power, who control the negative side of life and all the bad inventions they have like guns and bombs and hate. But there has to be a balance. We've got to all try harder to manifest more love in order to counteract all that.

There is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.

The evil implanted in man by nature spreads so imperceptibly, when the habit of wrong-doing is unchecked, that he himself can set no limit to his shamelessness.

There is more evil in the least sin than in the greatest affliction.

False language, evil in itself, infects the soul with evil.

The devil is not abroad at night in the form of a cat or a wolf or any other animal. He lives eternally in the hearts of men.

A man who broods on evil is as bad a man who does evil, if he is no worse.

All evil is good become cancerous.

For never, never, wicked man was wise.