Quotes by German Authors

The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other.
Erich Fromm
It isn't important to come out on top. What matters is to come out alive.
Bertolt Brecht
When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.
Charles Bukowski
The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
Max Stirner
Our whole education system is calculated to produce *feelings* in us, impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out...Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are 'pronounced of age." Our equipment consists of "elevating feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims,eternal principles.
Max Stirner
We all live with the objective of being happy our lives are all different and yet the same.
Anne Frank
Ithink that theworld should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, justcats andrain, rain and cats, very nice, goodnight.
Charles Bukowski
Astrophysics. 'It's a super-long shot' is practically the motto of our profession.
Marko Kloos
On one part of the footpath where a thin trickle of water from a small spring kept it damp, I found … a swarm of … small, blue butterflies drinking the water. … I only went that way on sunny days and each time the dense, blue swarm was there, and each time it was a holiday.
Hermann Hesse
Every society requires mutual accommodation and mutually agreeable temper; hence the larger it is, the duller.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Pushing the boundaries and uniting the world: That’s what Mars One is about.
Nico Marquardt
from the beginning, through themiddle years and up to theend:too bad, too bad, too bad.
Charles Bukowski
For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.
Erich Maria Remarque
If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.
Erich Fromm
When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.
Friedrich Schiller
We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.
Bernd Heinrich
At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, “With what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say ‘I want this, I ask for that’? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and the true God.
Martin Luther
O my God, how does it happen in this poor world that you are so great and yet nobody finds you, that you call so loudly and yet nobody hears you, that you are so near and yet nobody feels you, that you give yourself to everybody and yet nobody knows your name? Men flee from you and say they cannot find you; they turn their backs and say they cannot see you; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear you.
Hans Denck
Let temporal things be in the use, eternal things in the desire.
Thomas à Kempis
the ego likes to emphasize the 'otherness' of others
Eckhart Tolle
Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.
Meister Eckhart
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
Friedrich Nietzsche
German is a much more precise language than English. Americans throw the word love around for everything: I love my wife! I love all my friends! I love rock music! I love the rain! I love comic books! I love peanut butter! The word you use to describe your feelings for your wife should not be the same word you use to describe your feelings for peanut butter. In German, there are a dozen different words that describe varying degrees of liking something a lot. Germans almost never use the word love, unless they mean a deep romantic love. I have never told my parents I love them, because it would sound melodramatic, inappropriate, and almost incestuous. In German, you tell your mother that you hold her very dear, not that you are in love with her.
Oliver Markus
I had an interview once with some German journalist—some horrible, ugly woman. It was in the early days after the communists—maybe a week after—and she wore a yellow sweater that was kind of see-through. She had huge tits and a huge black bra, and she said to me, ‘It’s impolite; remove your glasses.’ I said, ‘Do I ask you to remove your bra?
Karl Lagerfeld
Defining by a general law the expenditures on the...school....is a very different thing from appointing the state as educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.
Karl Marx
But I won't bore you any longer on the subject of old men. It won't make things any better and all my plans of revenge (such as disconnecting the lamp, shutting the door, hiding his clothes) must be abandoned in order to keep the peace. Oh, I'm becoming so sensible! ...
Anne Frank
Psychology has a long past, but only a short history
Herman Ebbinghaus
Only the man who follows the command of Jesus single-mindedly, and unresistingly lets his yoke rest upon him, finds his burden easy, and under its gentle pressure receives the power to persevere in the right way. The command of Jesus is hard, unutterably hard, for those who try to resist it. But for those who willingly submit, the yoke is easy, and the burden is light.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It's probably not easy for a woman to understand what it's like to be a man. Imagine you're starving, and someone puts a huge buffet in front of you. There's delicious, mouth-watering food all around you, and it's really really hard not to eat it all. That's what it's like to be a man around attractive women. The urge to want to hump everything that moves is part of a man's natural programming. It's a deep-seated hunger. To suppress that hunger takes civilization and a lot of willpower.
Oliver Markus
A beautiful woman can have almost any man she wants. A rich man can have almost any woman he wants.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Man is free Woyzeck. Man is the ultimate expression of the individual urge to freedom.
Georg Büchner
The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen.
Fritz Haber
Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism
Max Scheler
I let you discover my skin but you found a way under.
Katja Michael
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.
Albert Einstein
The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I have smelt all the aromas there are in the fragrant kitchen they call Earth and what we can enjoy in this life I surely have enjoyed just like a lord!
Heinrich Heine
Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Freedom for the Church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise, it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I went over to see Marina two or three or four times a week. I knew as long as I could see the girl I would be all right…. Soon after, I got a letter from Fay. She and the child were living in a hippie commune in New Mexico. It was a nice place, she said. Marina would be able to breathe there. She enclosed a little drawing the girl had made for me.
Charles Bukowski
As in everything, nature is the best instructor.
Adolf Hitler
Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown.
Erich Fromm
Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback set it up on one side and it tumbles over on the other.
Martin Luther
The world had been divided into two parts that sought to annihilate each other because they both desired the same thing, namely the liberation of the oppressed, the elimination of violence, and the establishment of permanent peace.
Hermann Hesse
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Herbert Marcuse
She stood before him and surrendered herself to him and sky, forest, and brook all came toward him in new and resplendent colors, belonged to him, and spoke to him in his own language. And instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire world and every star in heaven glowed within him and sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and had found himself. But most people love to lose themselves.
Hermann Hesse
Rise up and become the person you were meant to be.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
If I love you, what business is it of yours?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.
Ludwig van Beethoven
And here poor fool with all my lore I stand no wiser than before.
Goethe
Being full of mischief, they love to listen;they gladly obey, for they like to betray you,pretending to be sent from Heaven,and lisping like angels, while they lie.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You understand, we just don't fuck with truth.
Charles Bukowski
It is not hard work that is dreary it is superficial work
Edith Hamilton
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Hermann Hesse
...according to God's Word, we should not give a singe drop of evangelical consolation to those who are still living in sin. ON THE OTHER HAND, we should not address the slightest threat or rebuke to the broken hearted--but only promises delivering consolation and grace, forgiveness of sin and righteousness. Life and salvation.
C.F.W. Walther
There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.
Goethe
Sex: In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.
Marlene Dietrich
People are too durable that's their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves they last too long.
Bertolt Brecht
The padres set great store by addressing prayer to personal gods: 'Genuine prayer exists only in religions in which there is a God as a person and a shape and endowed with a will.'That was stated by a famous Protestant. The anarch does not want to have anything to do with that conception. As for the One God: while he may be able to shape persons, he is not a person himself, and the he is already a patriarchal prejudice.A neuter One is beyond our grasp, while man converses ten with the Many Gods on equal terms, whether as their inventor or as their discoverer. In any case, it is man who named the gods. This is not to be confused with a high level soliloquy. Divinity must, without a doubt, be inside us and recognized as being inside us; otherwise we would have no concept of gods.
Ernst Jünger