There are those phrases that everyone knows. No wonder they still influence our worldview today. Yet almost no one knows where they come from, how they were originally meant – and what happened to them over the course of time. Bruno Preisendörfer embarks on an astonishing and exciting search for clues.
Famous quotations are often like literary figures: just as the latter escape from their original books, the former abandon their original contexts and take on a life of their own as they wander through people’s minds for centuries. Some swell with meanings they did not originally have, while others waste away to the point of meaninglessness. Preisendörfer makes many elegant detours to the curious and unexpected. The result is a book as instructive as it is entertaining, a marvelous thing somewhere between philosophical handbook, historical panopticon and essayistic diagnosis of our era.
