Marxist philosopher (1885-1977)
No entrance without any exit, no possible society without a spacious graveyard.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
What is a health which merely makes people ripe to be damaged, abused, and shot at again?
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
So the sick man has the feeling not that he lacks something but that he has too much of something. His discomfort, as something which is hanging around him and superfluous, has to go; pain is proud flesh. He dreams of the body which knows how to keep comfortably quiet again.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for.
ERNST BLOCH
Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom
We may finally risk the proposition that precisely because the doctor, even at the individual sick-bed, has an almost crazy utopian plan latently in view, he ostensibly avoids it. This definite plan, the final medical wishful dream, is nothing less than the abolition of death.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
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
Man on His Own
Even if in the building of mere castles in the air the total expenditure one way or the other scarcely matters, from which misdirected and ultimately fraudulently used wishful dreams then result, hope with plan and with connection to the due Possible is still the most powerful and best thing there is. And even if hope merely rises above the horizon, whereas only knowledge of the Real shifts it in solid fashion by means of practice, it is still hope alone which allows us to gain the inspiring and consoling understanding of the world to which it leads.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
The most tragic form of loss isn't the loss of security; it's the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
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, not even our name is there--the addressee for whom the alarm clock rings is identical to only a few, and the whole social story of waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
The couch from which the sick man arises would only be perfect if he was refreshed instead of merely patched up.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
The enlightened consciousness of life capitulates in the face of death, the ecclesiastical one cuts through it, but nowhere is the Gordian knot really entwined into victory.
ERNST BLOCH
The Heritage of Our Times
In capitalist society health is the capability to earn, among the Greeks it was the capability to enjoy, and in the Middle Ages the capability to believe.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
Most often the little man makes himself even smaller than he already is, so as not to be seen.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
God appears as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
To Jesus, the kingdom of this world was the devil. This is why he never suggested allowing it to go on; he did not conclude a non-aggression pact with it.
ERNST BLOCH
Man on His Own
Only an atheist can be a good Christian.
ERNST BLOCH
Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom
As the sick man does not skip and leap around, his wishes do so all the more.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
Fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, concretely genuine hope its most dedicated benefactor.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
We must die without much delay, and corpses may not require such expansive wrappings, in order to go the way of all flesh.
ERNST BLOCH
Man on His Own