Quotes by German Authors - Page 10

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
Hannah Arendt
Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Pride is the direct appreciation of oneself.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Buruma is wise to recommend a balance of concessions and coordination in order to avoid war.
Renate Bridenthal
One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!
Friedrich Nietzsche
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock
Charles Bukowski
From a pound of iron, that costs little, a thousand watch-springs can be made, whose value becomes prodigious. The pound you have received from the Lord,--use it faithfully.
Robert Schumann
Many persons seek community because they are afraid of loneliness...those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misuing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear...it is precisely such misuse of community that creates deadly isolation of human beings.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I quite enjoy the lines on my forehead because they show my life. That’s my history and I like to see that in other people. Like this wrinkle is due to some girl who broke my heart. I don’t want to escape it in any way.
Michael Fassbender
The discipline gave me a sense of achievement. Not least, fasting is a test of willpower and, whenever I felt my willpower weakening, I would tell myself that I could eat as much as I wanted after sunset. But then the strange thing was that after fasting all day long, I tended to feel full with just a small snack.
Kristiane Backer
Imagination is the highest form of research.
Albert Einstein
On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them ; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.This is, in the highest degree, the case with many of Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of fantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Everything bad in the Old Testament (and there's a lot) is there to point out our sin, while everything good in the Old Testament is there to point us to our Savior.
Martin Luther
The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.
Thomas Mann
It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Most economic histories of the "world" not only omit most extra-European production and exchange (even most of that outside West Europe or even northwest Europe); they neglect the participation of the productive and exchange activities of extra-European countries in the European, not to say world, process of accumulation and development. Moreover, they disregard the part that these productive and exchange relations played in the developing world system.
André Gunder Frank
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
Albert Einstein
Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy
Arthur Schopenhauer
How can we “find ourselves” again? How can man “know himself”? He is a thing obscure and veiled. If the hare has seven skins, man can cast from him seventy times seven skins, and not be able to say: “Here you truly are; there is skin no more.”Also this digging into oneself, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one’s being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start. You may easily take such hurt, that no doctor can heal you. And what is the point: since everything bears witness to our essence — our friendships and enmities, our looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses, our books and our writing!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure.
Albert Einstein
The risen Lord is the new Temple, the real meeting place between God and man.
Pope Benedict XVI
I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
Erich Fromm
If you wish to stand and progress as you ought, hold yourself an exile and a pilgrim on the earth.
Thomas à Kempis
Every day look at a beautiful picture read a beautiful poem listen to some beautiful music and if possible say some reasonable thing.
Goethe
Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.
Max Wertheimer
Everyone will be taxed according to his means.
J. C. F. von Schiller
On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.
Theodor W. Adorno
The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
the rent is a little higher herebut so far I've been able to pay itand that's a miracle toolike still maybe being sanewhile thinking of guns and sidewalksand old ladies in libraries.
Charles Bukowski
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
For all works and things, which are either commanded or forbidden by God and thus have been instituted by the supreme Majesty, are 'musts.' Nevertheless, no one should be dragged to them or away from them by the hair, for I can drive no man to heaven or beat him into it with a club.
Martin Luther
It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.
Erich Maria Remarque
It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun
Charles Bukowski
The sin underneath all our sins is to trust the lie of the serpent that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ and must take matters into our own hands
Martin Luther
The British call junzi a "gentleman," no surprise. The Americans have no gentlemen, so they translate junzi as "the superior man." The Germans have no gentlemen either, and "superior man" is reserved, so they call junzi an "edler" meaning a person of noble blood. To sum up, all Europeans call junzi anything but junzi, which is quite a scandal.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
There are three lessons I would write-Three words, as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light,Upon the heart of men.Have hope! though clouds environ round,And gladness hides her face in scorn,Put thou the shadow from thy brow,No night but hath its morn.Have love! not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call,And scatter like the circling sun,Thy charities on all.
Friedrich Schiller
Christianity sees in the picture of Jesus as the Christ a human life in which all forms of anxiety are present but in which all forms of despair are absent.
Paul Tillich
Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
Eckhart Tolle
Nature reacts not only to physical disease but also to moral weakness when the danger increases she gives us greater courage.
Johann von Goethe
Wherever you go, there you are.
Thomas à Kempis
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
Albert Einstein
Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Each person is alone with his pain, even when others share the same fate.
Dorthe Binkert
God will forgive me. That's his business.
Heinrich Heine
Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Thomas Mann
If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been nor revolutions; there would have been no change because a culture would have succeeded in making man submit to its patterns without resistance. But man, being only relatively malleable, has always reacted with protest against conditions which made the disequilibrium between the social order and his human needs too drastic or unbearable. The attempt to reduce this disequilibrium and the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution is at the very core of the dynamism of the evolution of man in history. Man's protest arose not only because of material suffering; specifically human needs...are an equally strong motivation for revolution and the dynamics of change.
Erich Fromm
To conclude this personal note, I, William Joyce, will merely say that I left England because I would not fight for Jewry against the Führer and National Socialism, and because I believe most ardently, as I do today, that victory and a perpetuation of the old system would be an incomparably greater evil for [England] than defeat coupled with a possibility of building something new, something really national, something truly socialist.
Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce)
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.
Ernst Cassirer
We must accept finite disappointment but we must never lose infinite hope.
Martin Luther King
...and Věra said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it's all white, how do the squirrels know where they've buried their hoard?... Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what it is we find in the end?
W.G. Sebald
The best slave is the one who thinks he is free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.
Johann von Goethe
Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits--the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.
Judith Schalansky
Gaiety alone as it were is the hard cash of happiness everything else is just a promissory note.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.
Anne Frank