Quotes by German Authors - Page 18

No man will succeed unless he is ready to face and overcome difficulties and is prepared to assume responsibilities.
William J. H. Boetcker
It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more.
Hermann Hesse
It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion.
Pope Benedict XVI
He has been waiting for us, waiting in vain, and His fatherly heart was filled with grief. When He then sought to call us home through chastenings, we rebelled against Him and His actions and again refused to come home to the Father. What else should He do with us?
M. Basilea Schlink
We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
Meister Eckhart
Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?
Friedrich Nietzsche
We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.
Peter Sloterdijk
There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.
Albert Schweitzer
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
Thomas Mann
Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
Albert Einstein
Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
Erik Erikson
None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.
Edith Hamilton
Compassion is the basis of morality.
Arthur Schopenhauer
If we were scars, our memories would be the stitches holding us together. You couldn't cut them apart, and if you did, it would tear you in two.""But my memories hurt," she said. "I want to forget. There's so much I just want to forget.""How are you going to do that ? Everything that's happened to you is still happening today. Once something has begun, it doesn't end. There, in your head, it never ends.
Kai Meyer
and love is a word usedtoo much andmuchtoo soon.
Charles Bukowski
every thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently changing line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity it occurs. Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspects by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior, for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one's mind.
Hannah Arendt
Eyes and ears are not the problem... It is rage that blinds and deafens us. Or fear. Envy, mistrust. The world contracts, gets all out of joint when you are angry or afraid.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
Erik H. Erikson
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I have always suspected that correctness is the last refuge of those who have nothing to say.
Friedrich Wasiman
Time is an illusion.
Albert Einstein
I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.
Albert Einstein
God is Santa Claus for Grown-Ups.
Oliver Markus
We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.
Johann Baptist Metz
I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
Hermann Hesse
Don't look for peace. Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender
Eckhart Tolle
The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Time is a part of eternity and of the same piece with it.
Moses Mendelssohn
The entire day receives order and discipline when it acquires unity. This unity must be sought and found in morning prayer. The morning prayer determines the day.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Have faith, let go, and gravitate towards. 
Stefan Emunds
Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
Karl Marx
Unfortunately robots capable of manufacturing robots do not exist. That would be the philosopher's stone, the squaring of the circle.
Ernst Jünger
take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning
Charles Bukowski
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
Walter Benjamin
A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is manlike to punish but godlike to forgive.
Peter von Winter
In general, those who resort to mass murder on a collective scale always put forward the justification that they acted on behalf of the nation.
Taner Akçam
Magically, hopelessness gives rise to profound hope.
Stefan Emunds
Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.
Cornelia Funke
if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A day came when I should have died,and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
Every death even the cruelest deathdrowns in the total indifference of NatureNature herself would watch unmovedif we destroyed the entire human raceI hate Naturethis passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-facethat can bear everythingthis goads us to greater and greater acts
Peter Weiss
Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If any religion turns against love of equal partners, there's something flawed with the religion, not the love.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Our cure for pain is the very root of it: Revenge.
Felix O. Hartmann
None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A man can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days.
Goethe
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
Erich Fromm
A woman must be a woman and cannot be a man. She, too, is God's creature and her divine station is that she should bear and care for and rear children. So I am a man created for another office and work. But should I be proud because of this and say: I am not a woman, therefore I am better in the sight of God? Should I not rather praise God for creating both the woman and me also through the woman and putting me in this station? What a un-Christian thing it is that one should despire another because he is in another station or is doing something other then he is doing?... "Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled." for God will not and can not tolerate such pride and arrogance.
Martin Luther
[Government]is cancerous in head and limbs;only its belly is sound, and the laws it excretes are the most strightforward shit in the world.
Otto von Bismarck
I've never thought much of strictly organised and methodical study. You can't arrange a library in alphabetical order until you've collected one.
Walter Moers
The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning. - Albert Einstein, letter of February 5, 1921
Albert Einstein
Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan's principles, since the time of the gospels.
Erich Fromm
I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'.
Konrad Bloch
It may seem odd to say that the men who made the myths disliked the irrational and had a love for facts; but it is true, no matter how wildly fantastic some of the stories are...
Edith Hamilton
I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the
William Herschel