"Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled"
About this Quote
Trust the system, Grillparzer warns, and you may wake up homeless - not because you were careless, but because the ground you assumed was stable was never yours to begin with. The line lands with the grim snap of an eviction notice: the “system” isn’t a shelter, it’s a moving scaffold. You invest your life in its promises (rights, status, security), and the structure quietly rearranges itself while you’re still climbing.
The image does the real work. “Building your third story” suggests ambition, progress, bourgeois confidence: the belief that patience and good behavior add up to upward mobility. Then comes the twist: “the two lower ones have already been dismantled.” It’s not a collapse; it’s dismantling - deliberate, procedural, almost bureaucratic. Grillparzer isn’t describing a freak disaster but an orderly removal of foundations, the kind of change that can be justified with rules, reforms, or “necessity.” The subtext is that institutions can undo your past while you’re busy planning your future.
Context matters: Grillparzer lived through post-Napoleonic restoration, censorship, and the anxious modernizing of the Habsburg world - a period when regimes rewrote the social contract and called it stability. As a poet watching power operate through paperwork and propriety, he frames political volatility as architectural betrayal. The intent isn’t anarchic swagger; it’s a cold-eyed instruction in self-preservation: don’t confuse participation with protection, and don’t assume continuity just because the paperwork looks intact.
The image does the real work. “Building your third story” suggests ambition, progress, bourgeois confidence: the belief that patience and good behavior add up to upward mobility. Then comes the twist: “the two lower ones have already been dismantled.” It’s not a collapse; it’s dismantling - deliberate, procedural, almost bureaucratic. Grillparzer isn’t describing a freak disaster but an orderly removal of foundations, the kind of change that can be justified with rules, reforms, or “necessity.” The subtext is that institutions can undo your past while you’re busy planning your future.
Context matters: Grillparzer lived through post-Napoleonic restoration, censorship, and the anxious modernizing of the Habsburg world - a period when regimes rewrote the social contract and called it stability. As a poet watching power operate through paperwork and propriety, he frames political volatility as architectural betrayal. The intent isn’t anarchic swagger; it’s a cold-eyed instruction in self-preservation: don’t confuse participation with protection, and don’t assume continuity just because the paperwork looks intact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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