Quotes by German Authors - Page 20

We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.
Martin Luther
Basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same thing
Adolf Hitler
Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.
Karl Marx
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.
Eckhart Tolle
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed.
Albert Einstein
What remains of people is what media can store and communicate.
Friedrich A. Kittler
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Giving is the highest expression of potency.
Erich Fromm
Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone.
Charles Bukowski
How ridiculous that water ran out of your eyes when your heart hurt. Tragic heroines in books tended to be amazingly beautiful. Not a word about swollen eyes or a red nose. "Crying always gives me a red nose," thought Elinor. "I expect that's why I'll never be in any book.
Cornelia Funke
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
Thomas Mann
If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.
Meister Eckhart
There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
Friedrich Nietzsche
No permanence is ours; we are a waveThat flows to fit whatever form it finds:Through night or day, cathedral or the caveWe pass forever, craving form that binds.
Hermann Hesse
The silence leans forward.
Saša Stanišić
In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm. ... In the real world, all rests on perseverance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The worst will happen. Think of me, children, when that day comes. I have foreseen it and predicted it. Our age is corrupt. It stinks. Think of me - I smelled it out. I am not deceived. I sense the coming catastrophe. It will be like nothing that has ever happened. Everything will be swallowed up, which will be no loss-except in my case. Everything that exists will fall apart. It is rotten. I have sensed it, tasted it and cast it away from me. When it comes, it will bury us all. I pity you children, for you will not be able to live your lives. Whereas I have had a beautiful life
Klaus Mann
The best remedy for those who are afraid lonely or unhappy is to go outside somewhere where they can be quiet alone with the heavens nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists and it certainly always will I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
Anne Frank
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
Erich Fromm
I feel no grief for being called somethingwhichI am not;in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a goodback rub
Charles Bukowski
Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
Wernher von Braun
An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.
Ernst Haeckel
There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If God were our one and only desire we would not be so easily upset when our opinions do not find outside acceptance.
Thomas à Kempis
There are situations of course that leave you utterly speechless. All you can do is hint at things. Words, too, can't do more than just evoke things. That's where dance comes in again.
Pina Bausch
Actually, what does man live for?” “To think about it. Any other question?” “Yes. Why does he die just when he has done that and has become a bit more sensible?” “Some people die without having become more sensible.” “Don’t evade my question. And don’t start talking about the transmigration of souls.” “I’ll ask you something else first. Lions kill antelopes; spiders flies; foxes chickens; which is the only race in the world that wars on itself uninterruptedly, fighting and killing one another?” “Those are questions for children. The crown of creation, of course, the human being— who invented the words love, kindness, and mercy.” “Good. And who is the only being in Nature that is capable of committing suicide and does it?” “Again the human being— who invented eternity, God, and resurrection.” “Excellent,” Ravic said. “You see of how many contradictions we consist. And you want to know why we die?
Erich Maria Remarque
The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
Theodor W. Adorno
Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes - they'd sooner eat the same things all the time - but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes.
Walter Moers
Please lift your snowy skies off my soul -Your diamond dreams slice through my veins
Else Lasker-Schüler
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
Adolf Hitler
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.Quoted in The Situationists and the City, pg. 194
Friedrich Engels
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
Goethe
schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff" (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles, flees before the sound of music almost as much as before the Word of God....Music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men. Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful. Then one forgets all wrath, impurity, and other devices.
Martin Luther
A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
O heavenly Father,protect and bless all thingsthat have breath: guard themfrom all evil and let them sleep in peace.
Albert Schweitzer
Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored.
Oliver Markus
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.
Hannah Arendt
What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.
Martin Luther
It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect — a process which occurs in every dialectical victory — you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage. — Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as “Death before dishonour,” and so on.
Arthur Schopenhauer
as if a round apple presented itself to my hand, a ripe, golden apple with a soft, cool, velvety skin - thus the world presented itself to me -tas if a tree nodded to me, a wide-branching, strong-willed tree, bent for reclining and as a footstool for the way-weary: thus the world stood upon my headland -tas if tender hands brought me a casket - a casket open for the delight of modest, adoring eyes: thus the world presented himself before me today - tnot so enigmatic as to frighten away human love, not so explicit as to put to sleep human wisdom - a good, human thing was the world to me today, this world of which so many evil things are said!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by and turned to the infinite.
Paul Tillich
Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.
Heinrich Heine
one doesn't even think ofthe liverand if the liverdoesn't think ofus, that'sfine.
Charles Bukowski
Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate. In this respect there was in the past a change of mentality, in which the law and the need for punishment were obscured. Ultimately this also narrowed the concept of law, which in fact is not only just being nice or courteous, but is found in the truth. And another component of the truth is that I must punish the one who has sinned against real love
Pope Benedict XVI
The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.
Erich Fromm
People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.
Charles Bukowski
[Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.
Peter Sloterdijk
Solitude is precious balm to my heart in these paradistic parts.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man's feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell.
Jean Paul Richter
Those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world.
Eckhart Tolle
Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, ‘Am I happy?’ and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, ‘No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.' Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first…Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there. In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
Albert Einstein
Every man has his moral backside too which he doesn't expose unnecessarily but keeps covered as long as possible by the trousers of decorum.
G. C. Lichtenberg
If I have a theological virtue, it is curiosity or inquisitiveness.
Jürgen Moltmann
If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.
Eckhart Tolle