Quotes by German Authors - Page 12

Faith does not limit itself by the idea of a world, a universe, a necessity.
Ludwig Feuerbach
It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.
Hermann Rauschning
Is it not shameful to accept God's blessings as though they were our due without thinking of the heart of the Giver, who planned them all in love for us, and giving Him the response of love and gratitude?
M. Basilea Schlink
The Glory was entrusted to you, you weren't given permission to pass it on as you see fit.
Michael Ende
I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.
Hermann Hesse
There is no reality except the one contained within us.
Hermann Hesse
Reiterating other people's hopes, dreams and fears. That's what politics is all about.
Antonio G. Kowatsch
When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against Nature must lead to their own downfall.
Adolf Hitler
People say, "How can God let that happen? How can God remain silent about all the wicked things that happen on earth, about all the terrible crimes that are committed?" And here again self-righteousness makes us blind and deaf.We no longer perceive how God speaks in judgment through wars and all the other troubles in the world. Yes, He is speaking powerfully. Such judgments are His last attempt to win us back in love.
M. Basilea Schlink
Apart from my absolute belief in National Socialism and my conviction of Hitler's superhuman heroism, I had always been attracted to Germany.
Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce)
To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness
Robert Muller
One thing I know the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein
We see that the law was not reveal to us to put a notion into our heads that we could become righteous by it, but to teach us that we are completely unable to fulfill the law. Then we will know what a sweet message-what a glorious doctrine-the gospel is and move receive it with exuberant joy.
C.F.W. Walther
So many questions remain unanswered. Perhaps we are poorer for having lost a possible explanation or richer for having gained a mystery. But aren't both possibilities equally intriguing?
Peter Wohlleben
What does not engage our feelings does not long engage our thoughts either.
Lou Andreas-Salomé
Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
...the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.
Eckhart Tolle
Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
Werner Herzog
If you would create something,you must be something.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Seen politically, systems follow one another, each consuming the previous one. They live on ever-bequeathed and ever-disappointed hope, which never entirely fades. Its spark is all that survives, as it eats its way along the blasting fuse. For this spark, history is merely an occasion, never a goal.
Ernst Jünger
The world's history is constant like the laws of nature and simple like the souls of men.
J. C. F. von Schiller
You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.
Caspar David Friedrich
Don't ever think you're better than a drug addict, because your brain works the same as theirs. You have the same circuits. And drugs would affect your brain in the same way it affects theirs. The same thought process that makes them screw up over and over again would make you screw up over and over as well, if you were in their shoes. You probably already are doing it, just not with heroin or crack, but with food or cigarettes, or something else you shouldn't be doing.
Oliver Markus
I am better than my reputation.
Friedrich von Schiller
He who sleeps does not sin.
Martin Luther
Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal.
Elisabeth Lenk
Love means to commit oneself without guarantee to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
Erich Fromm
Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.
Erich Fromm
Success flourishes only in perseverance--ceaseless, restless perseverance.”Baron Manfred von Richthofen (1892-1918); Former Fighter Pilot
Baron Manfred von Richthofen
That Detroit ultimately concentrated on automobiles could be traced to one genius, Henry Ford.... But that the necessary human energy for this development existed in Detroit could be proven through its early history.... I told him what I knew of the settlement in Detroit and of the climate, certainly almost the worst in the United States. Only the very strong could survive.... To defeat the conditions imposed by earth and sky at Detroit required intensive labor by energetic men who were not tempted by pleasure and play.
William Valentiner
[a] characteristic of a symbol is that it opens up levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us.[a symbol] also unlocks dimensions and elements of our soul which correspond to the dimensions and elements of reality. A great play gives us not only a new vision of the human scene, but it opens up hidden depths of our own being.
Paul Tillich
Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.
Erich Fromm
The constant talker will never, or a least rarely, grasp truth. Of course even he must experience some truths, otherwise he could not exist. He does notice certain facts, observe certain relations, draw conclusions and make plans. But he does not yet possess genuine truth, which comes into being only when the essence of an object, the significance of a relaton, and what is valid and eternal in this world reveal themselves. This requires the spacousness, freedom, and pure receptiveness of that inner “clean-swept room” whilch silence alone can create
Romano Guardini
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
Albert Einstein
She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it.
Charles Bukowski
Reading is not an end to itself, but a means to an end.
Adolf Hitler
All one can really leave one's children is what's inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.
Wernher von Braun
Every thing that is done in the world is done by hope.
Martin Luther
Life isn't worth living, unless it is lived for someone else.
Albert Einstein
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.
Eckhart Tolle
Common human experience alone is no guarantee with which we can build a science of psychology.
Wolfgang Köhler
I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.
Charles Bukowski
Where did all the women come from? The supply was endless. Each one of them was individual, different. Their pussies were different, their kisses were different, their breasts were different, but no man could drink them all, there were too many of them, crossing their legs, driving men mad. What a feast!
Charles Bukowski
Ordinary people are products of their environment and fit in. Artists transcend their environment and stand out.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Water is sufficient...the spirit moves over water.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I am bound by conscience and the word of God. Therefore I can and will recant nothing, because to act against one's conscience is neither safe nor salutary. Here I stad. I can do no ether. So help me God.
Martin Luther
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
Arthur Schopenhauer
What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Those speak foolishly who ascribe their anger or their impatience to such as offend them or to tribulation. Tribulation does not make people impatient, but proves that they are impatient. So everyone may learn from tribulation how his heart is constituted.
Martin Luther
Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.
Charles Bukowski
Talents are best nurtured in solitude: character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.
Goethe
women were beyond me.they saw somethingdepraved.there was one waitressa little older thanI, she rather smiled,lingered when shebrought mycoffee.that was plenty for me, that wasenough.- Young in New Orleans
Charles Bukowski
There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.
Martin Luther
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by.” Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged. That freedom is indispensable, as is the political involvement that goes with it.
Stéphane Hessel
Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle
Werner Herzog
Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs I would enter.
Martin Luther