"This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy"
About this Quote
Searching, doubting, vacillating: Grillparzer stacks the verbs like a weary clerk tallying the motions of a restless mind. The rhythm is almost impatient, and the payoff is brutal: when nothing is clear, what survives is not truth but “the arrogance of quest.” It’s a line that punctures Romanticism from the inside. The age that canonized yearning and celebrated the heroic seeker gets re-described as self-flattery: the quester doesn’t just want answers; he wants to feel morally elevated for asking.
The second sentence twists the knife. “I, too” signals complicity, not superiority. Grillparzer isn’t scolding youth from an unearned pedestal; he’s confessing a former addiction to “noble ideas,” then labeling it what it often is: adolescence dressed up as philosophy. The move is classic Grillparzer, an Austrian writing under the long shadow of post-Napoleonic restoration and Metternich-era caution, when grand ideals were both politically dangerous and, in private life, increasingly suspect. In that climate, the cult of the searching soul can look less like courage and more like performance.
The intent isn’t to argue against thinking; it’s to demote a certain style of thinking. The subtext says: uncertainty is honest, but making a shrine of uncertainty is vanity. “Quest” becomes a social pose, a way to keep moving so you never have to choose, commit, or be wrong in public. The line works because it’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-self-dramatizing, a mature skepticism aimed at the ego hiding inside idealism.
The second sentence twists the knife. “I, too” signals complicity, not superiority. Grillparzer isn’t scolding youth from an unearned pedestal; he’s confessing a former addiction to “noble ideas,” then labeling it what it often is: adolescence dressed up as philosophy. The move is classic Grillparzer, an Austrian writing under the long shadow of post-Napoleonic restoration and Metternich-era caution, when grand ideals were both politically dangerous and, in private life, increasingly suspect. In that climate, the cult of the searching soul can look less like courage and more like performance.
The intent isn’t to argue against thinking; it’s to demote a certain style of thinking. The subtext says: uncertainty is honest, but making a shrine of uncertainty is vanity. “Quest” becomes a social pose, a way to keep moving so you never have to choose, commit, or be wrong in public. The line works because it’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-self-dramatizing, a mature skepticism aimed at the ego hiding inside idealism.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Franz
Add to List
