Star of the Unborn Quotes

“An old proverb says: “Veritas vincit,” truth is victorious. Unfortunately this adage is an idealistic overestimate and misjudges life’s realities. By the end of the days of mankind, of course, truth will have conquered. Until then, however, the opposite is usually the case: “Victoria verifacit,” victory makes truth.

Every historical era reflects the face of the most recent victor.”
― Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn

“Could the cosmos possibly have a face with a horribly receding forehead and with cannibalistic jaws?”
― Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn

“Every once in a while I get the queer notion that every human soul experiences everything, both outwardly and inwardly, that the world has to offer in the way of experiences. If that were not so, there would be no equality before God. The difference between souls does not lie in their ability or inability to have experiences but only in the degree of articulation with which they become conscious of these experiences. Even those who are simple enough to discount the more mysterious conditions of our soul as “extravagant fancies” are filled and permeated by them. For this reason the hope springs eternal that even the most ineffable inner experience will strike a responsive chord in someone who will exclaim in brotherly surprise: “I’ve had exactly the same experience.”
― Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn

“Did I hear somebody plaintively say the word “democracy?” Well, there really can’t be much argument about my hundred noble brides and fiancés. Moreover there can’t be much argument about the repeatedly stated fact that these people were not only living in a perfect democracy but in the most ideal form of communism. But for the very reason that democracy had become an absolute matter of course since untold millennia, it had ceased to exist. For democracy is one of those relativisms of life that ceases to exist as soon as it is realized. As long as the just demands for material and potential equality of every citizen of the globe had not been fulfilled, politicians and journalists could make a living by reiterating these just demands. But when, after endless battles, victories, and defeats, democracy finally triumphed, the much deeper inequalities than the material ones came into prominence: inequalities of beauty, of strength, of will, character, idiocy, cynicism, indolence, cleverness, talent, acumen—all those things for which God and nature can be held responsible, but no ruling party. I devoutly hope, however, that my report from the most remote future will not create a panic among our radical politicians and give them the deleterious notion that the only hope for their business lies in the secret soft-pedaling of material and potential inequality.”
― Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn

“And among the most highly developed of these was the order of spiders.
Many a reader will no doubt be filled with loathing at the thought. That’s simply because he does not have the Astromental man’s attitude toward the spider but connects it with all sorts of horrid nursery tales and obsolete superstitions. For the cosmically expert sages in the Djebei, however, the spider was almost sacred, a hieratic animal. Why? In the first place, the spider is the physical image of the star in the animal kingdom; its body consists of a rounded core from which its long limbs radiate in all directions. The spider is unique among animals in respect to this form. In the second place, from its inwards the spider emits a white thread by means of which it fashions a net in which it hangs like a star in its network of rays. The spider thus symbolizes the creative process of the emission of “radiant energy, the scientific name for light. In the third place, suspended in the center of its radiating web, the spider calmly waits for its victims, flies, gnats, and moths. It never moves, for its prey is bound to fall within its grasp. Thus the spider symbolizes the star’s force of gravitation, the fundamental universal force called attraction,” that maintains the original creative impulse in motion and balance.”
― Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn

“No one of us has ever heard of a ‘Xenospasm’. The word is unknown, but the thing itself is a familiar human condition. Ordinary nostalgia in its double form, for example, yearning for a distant place and longing for a past time is a typical case of Xenospasm. This familiar sensation is much more complicated and is much more capable of intensification than one is inclined to imagine. The nostalgia of a retired old sea dog for his ship that is still seaworthy, is a fairly simple matter. The nostalgia of a refugee for his fatherland is much more complex, because he knows perfectly well that what he has lost changes with every passing hour and therefore becomes irretrievable. The impossibility of its real appeasement is the spice of every respectable case of nostalgia, just as the hopelessness of retrieving what is gone and lost is the pungent spice of exile.”
― Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn

“You probably recall even better than I that human superstition of that time made the happiness of nations dependent upon two economic systems that were both wrong. Both led to serfdom of the individual: one under the heel of the ruling classes, the other under the heel of the ruling masses. It was the most stupid either-or in world history, which always develops by virtue of such alternatives. How could there be peace in my old age as long as two systems existed side by side that hated as well as envied each other?”
― Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn

“If I don’t succeed in staying awake I will lose myself. That’s not strong enough. If I fall asleep I shall lose myself in the wilderness of an unexampled and nameless lostness. That’s what I feel. That’s what I fear. That has nothing to do with real death. That’s death raised to an unheard of power. I’m familiar with real death. It’s simple and plain and solid, and death shouldn’t be pictured as a bony specter with a scythe but as an old peasant gazing speculatively at the sunset. But to give up one’s ego a second time because one falls into the trap of sleep, that’s too much, far too much.”
― Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn