Quotes by German Authors - Page 16

The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.
Geoffrey Hartman
That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation... Will replaces vision; temporality of the act outsts the eternity of the "good-in-itself"As the product of the indifferent, his being, too, must be indifferent. Then the facing of his morality would simply warrant the reaction "let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." There is no point in caring for what has no sanction behind it in any creative intention.
Hans Jonas
Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as θανάτου μελέτη. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A poem is a frozen momentmelted by each reader for themselvesto flow into the here and now.
Hilde Domin
Logic is the key to an all-inclusive spiritual well-being.
Marlene Dietrich
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that viciousness!
Friedrich Nietzsche
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?
Erich Fromm
During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration.
Rosa Luxemburg
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him and that all merely exists for his sake.
Goethe
Everyone needs help from everyone.
Bertolt Brecht
Try not to become a man of success but rather a man of value.
Albert Einstein
The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life.
Hermann Hesse
And it seems people should not build houses anymoreit seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms on second floorsunder electric lightswithout shades;it seems there is a lot to forgetand a lot not to doand in drugstores, markets, bars,the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at nightand look through this house and the house does not want to be built
Charles Bukowski
Be aware of too much wisdom!
Hermann Hesse
Lord, whatsoever this day may bring, Thy name be praised. Be gracious unto me and help me. Grant me strength to bear whatsoever Thou dost send, And let not fear overrule me. I trust Thy grace, and commit my life wholly into Thy Hands. Whether I live or whether I die, I am with Thee and Thou are with me … Lord, I wait for Thy salvation, and for the coming of Thy Kingdom. Amen.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I don’t care about losing people who don’t wanna be in my life anymore. I’ve lost people who meant the world to me and I’m still doing just fine.
Karl May
Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace
Hermann Hesse
If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.
Albert Einstein
There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.
Albert Dietrich
Time is that in which all things pass away.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
Karl Marx
The future belongs to us. I think that art is a force that can change the world.
Shahin Najafi
Die before you die and find that there is no death.
Eckhart Tolle
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
She'll be your dance partner, Jordan""Her? She's much too good. I'm scared!""Remember the feeling. Someday you'll want to write about it, and then it'll be good to know how the fear feels and to go ahead and dance all the same.
Nina George
Human nature must be something which always remains one and the same, but which may be carried out in manifold ways.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.
Hermann Hesse
The strong one doesn't win, the one that wins is strong.
Franz Beckenbauer
And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egoism and instinctuality, and that even such sublime creations as the Order were born in this cloudy torrent and sooner or later will be swallowed up by it again...Nor was this ever merely an intellectual problem for him. Rather, it engaged his innermost self more than any other problem, and he felt it as partly his responsibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an ideal they have believed in, or the country and community they love, afflicted with ills.
Hermann Hesse
I read like the flame reads the wood.
Alfred Döblin
Hell was what you made it
Charles Bukowski
Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.
Karl Marx
Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party – though they are quite numerous – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice, but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.
Rosa Luxemburg
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Walter Benjamin
Unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being; on the other hand, to be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me,maybe this, or that—there is always a fear that love could disappear. Furthermore, "deserved" love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used.
Erich Fromm
Western education remains a fetish of the colonial past.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A tolerance that no longer distinguishes between good and evil would become chaotic and self-destructive, just as a freedom that did not respect the freedom of others or find the common measure of our respective liberties would become anarchy and destroy authority.
Pope Benedict XVI
The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.
Friedrich von Schiller
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there
Friedrich Nietzsche
Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay than they think.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
Mies Van Der Rohe
When the time has come, every leaf turns to face the sun!
Akilnathan Logeswaran
It is neither right nor safe to go against my conscience.
Martin Luther
I am too sick to lay downthe sidewalks frighten methe whole damned city frightens me,what I will becomewhat I have becomefrightens me.
Charles Bukowski
I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.
Charles Bukowski
And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.
Erich Maria Remarque
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.
Herbert Marcuse
Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Repentance is the gateway through which the Gospel can come to us. Repentance is the gateway to a joy-filled life with Christ, for it is the prerequisite for attaining forgiveness, and wherever forgiveness is received, there is salvation and joy.
M. Basilea Schlink
A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.
Thomas Mann
The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible...The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it ask for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
Martin Heidegger
Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.
Werner Heisenberg
Christian life consists of faith and charity.
Martin Luther
A day, whether six or seven years ago or whether six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in now.
Meister Eckhart
It breaks my heart. Better than your words, your eye tells me all your peril.You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you and made you too wakeful.You long for the open heights, your soul thirsts for the stars. But your bad instincts too thirst for freedom. Your fierce dogs long for freedom; they bark for joy in their cellar when your spirit aspires to break open all prisons.To me you are still a prisoner who imagines freedom: ah, such prisoners of the soul become clever, but also deceitful and base.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fashion is about two things: the evolution and the opposite.
Karl Lagerfeld