Quotes by Robert Hartmann

“Legat was praying that Hartmann would be there. He was not sure what he could offer God in return, but it would be something, he promised Him”

“there were tiny swastikas on the taps. (There was no escaping the Führer’s aesthetic, thought Hartmann, not even when one took a shit.)””

“James here singles out for disapproval “a pessimistic principle like Schopenhauer’s incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann’s wicked jack-of-all-trades, the Unconscious.” The trouble with determinism, fatalism, pessimism, the unconscious, and materialism is that in our better hours we feel such limited and limiting forces to be “so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in human affairs.” Each explains away the objects of our thought or translates them “into terms of no emotional pertinency, [leaving] the mind with little to care or act for.”4 James pins his argument to daily life. “It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests,” he writes. “Cognition is incomplete until discharged in act.”5””

“Men are secretly inclined to distrust their own understandings, as well as obstinately to stand by opinions once adopted. It is therefore exceedingly difficult to convince any person by deduction, because he always distrusts the method, even when he has no specific objection to raise; whereas in induction he needs think less strenuously and exactly, but can, as it were, touch the truth by sight and direct perception.””

“Hartmann said, ‘How many people would you say have turned out to watch?’ Kordt scanned the few groups of spectators. ‘I’d say no more than two hundred.’ ‘He won’t like that.’ ‘No, he won’t.””

“Let one consider, further, that the foolish vanity of man goes so far as to prefer to seem rather than to be not merely well but also happy, so that every one carefully hides where the shoe pinches, and tries to make a show of opulence, contentment, and happiness which he does not at all possess.””

“If I have the choice either of not at all hearing, or of hearing first for five minutes discords and then for five minutes a fine piece of music; if I have the choice either not to smell at all, or to smell first a stench and then a perfume; if I have the choice either not to taste, or to taste first something disagreeable and then something agreeable, I shall in all the cases decide for the non-hearing, non-smelling, and non-tasting.””