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Ernst Bloch

16 quotes

“Only an atheist can be a good Christian.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Atheismus im Christentum 1968, english translation: Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom 1972
“How absurd it must seem for an immortal soul to be destined for Heaven or Hell, and yet be sitting in a kitchen, as a maid, or to see oneself objectified as a mechanic! how falsely the usual sunrise waked us, the clock dial, the city street the job! How wrongfully people find themselves in these systems — our time isn't there, our space isn't there, our space isn't even here... the whole social story of waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Traces (1930), p. 27
“In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Traces (1930), p. 30
“On bourgeois ground … change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Principle of Hope (1959), N. Plaice, trans. (1986), p. 4
“Aber es steht doch in der Regel so, daß die Seele schuldig werden muß, um das schlecht Bestehende zu vernichten, um nicht durch idyllischen Rückzug, scheingute Duldung des Unrechts noch schuldiger zu werden.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even where Marx did not soften his main drive to a "revolutionary development," it was still aimed at capitalism alone (a relatively young and derivative cancer) and not equally at the age-old, lasting core of all enslavement, cruelty and exploitation: at militarism, feudalism and the supremacist world at large.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Desgleichen kann es ... keinem Zweifel unterliegen, daß die unterschiedslos ideologische Verdächtigung jeder Idee, ohne Bedürfnis, selbst eine zu exaltieren, das Lichtere nicht ermutigt.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... wenn der Marxismus atheistisch fix mit Status quo bleibt, um der Menschenseele nichts als einen mehr oder minder eudämonistisch eingerichteten »Himmel« auf Erden zu setzen - ohne die Musik, die aus diesem mühelos funktionierenden Mechanismus der Ökonomie und des Soziallebens zu ertönen hätte.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Denn wir müssen sterben, mit kurzem Verzug, und vielleicht brauchen die Leichen keinen so weiten Faltenwurf, den Weg alles Fleisches zu gehen. Der brüderlich innere Reichtum wird nicht minder kurzer Spuk, verwest zu Baumrinde wie Rübezahls falsche Schätze: zeigt sich in ihm keine Kraft, gar den Tod zu bestehen, zu besiegen, mithin nicht nur von unten an hindurch zu gehen, sondern auch an sich selbst ein kräftig oberer Teil zu sein und das Wesenselement des ewigen Lebens.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evil does not approach us as pride any more, but on the contrary as slumber, lassitude, concealment of the "I." … It may make us so quickly contented, that any definitive fire will die down. The venomous, breathtaking frigid mist seems able … to harden hearts and fill them with envy, obduracy and resentment, with bloody scorn for the divine image and light, with all the causes of the only true original sin, which is not wanting to be like God.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Roman came into the Promised Land that had become less and less as promised. The rich got along quite well with the foreign occupation; it provided protection from desperate peasants and patriotic resistance fighters. It provided protection from prophets who could be labeled "agitators" now, without any qualms.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jesus' own coming was by no means so introverted and other-worldly as a Pauline reinterpretation—always welcome to the ruling class—would have it. ... To Jesus, the kingdom of this world was the devil (John 8:44). This is why he never suggested allowing it to go on; he did not conclude a non-aggression pact with it.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All Joachimism was an active struggle against the social principles of a Christianity which from St. Paul on would ally itself with the class society in a thousand compromises, a Christianity whose earthly salvation practice is itself a single catalog of sins, down—or up—to the last link: the understanding which Fascism was shown by the Vatican.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the same society in which the processes of production and distribution will go on far out at the circumference, the essential human concerns will move to the center, to the end, into the teleological questions of "where to" and "what for.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In ourselves alone the absolute light keeps shining, a sigillum falsi et sui, mortis et vitae aeternae [false signal and signal of eternal life and death itself], and the fantastic move to it begins: to the external interpretation of the daydream, the cosmic manipulation of a concept that is utopian in principle. Finding this concept, finding the right for whose sake it behoves us to live, to be organized, to have time—this is where we are headed, why we are clearing the metaphysically constitutive trails afresh, calling for what is not, building into the blue that lines all edges of the world; this is why we build ourselves into the blue and search for truth and reality where mere factuality vanishes.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now to get back to our given Church: it lives almost entirely for modesty and moneyed piety. It zealously inveighs against the harm done to Joseph and the sheep, but it has made its arrangements with the upper classes and serves as their spiritual defender. It bristles at see-through blouses, but not at slums in which half-naked children starve, and not, above all, at the conditions that keep three quarters of mankind in misery. It condemns desperate girls who abort a foetus, but it consecrates war, which aborts millions. It has nationalized its God, nationalized him into ecclesiastic organization, and has inherited the Roman empire under the mask of the Crucified. It preserves misery and injustice, having first tolerated and then approved the class power that causes them; it prevents any seriousness about deliverance by postponing it to St. Never-Ever's Day or shifting it to the beyond.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source