Quotes by German Authors - Page 21

Religion is trust, and that trust arose in the beginning from the impressions made on the mind and heart of man by the order and wisdom of nature, and more particularly, by those regularly recurring events, the return of the sun, the revival of the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, by whatever name we choose to call it.
Friedrich Max Müller
I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.
Cornelia Funke
We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.
Karl Lagerfeld
My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.
Martin Luther
The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Our fragile, perishable bodies are not who we are. We are the sum of fleeting moments that belong to us for eternity. It is our choice and responsibility to create moments of beauty and grace, instead of despair and suffering.
Dorit Brauer
Storytelling is an ancient art that rarely receives the respect it deserves. Is it even possible to find someone these days with the time to give something precious to listeners, who understands stories at a profound level and can tell them without a book or a page in hand?
Erika Eichenseer
Merchant: 'So you have lived on the possessions of others?'Saddhartha: 'Apparently. The merchant also lives on the possession of others.'Merchant: 'Well spoken...
Hermann Hesse
Student is not a container you have to fill but a torch you have to light up.
Albert Einstein
Without literature, life is hell.
Charles Bukowski
If moderation is a fault then indifference is a crime.
G. C. Lichtenberg
The flesh resists this daily humiliation, first by a frontal attack, and later by hiding itself under the words of the spirit (i.e. in the name of 'evangelical liberty'). We claim liberty from all legal compulsion, from self-martyrdom and mortification, and play this off against the proper evangelical use of discipline and asceticism; we thus excuse our self-indulgence and irregularity in prayer, in meditation and in our bodily life. But the contrast between our behavior and the word of Jesus is all too painfully evident. We forget that discipleship means estrangement from the world, and we forget the real joy and freedom which are the outcome of a devout rule of life. As soon as a Christian recognizes that he has failed in his service, that his readiness has become feeble, and that he has sinned against another's life and become guilty of another's guilt, that all his joy in God has vanished and that his capacity for prayer has quite gone, it is high time for him to launch an assault upon the flesh, and prepare for better service by fasting and prayer (Luke 2:37; 4:2: Mark 9:29; 1 Cor. 7:5).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.
Charles Bukowski
[L]et it be remembered that atheism … is the secret of religion … ; religion … in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.
Ludwig Feuerbach
A vibrant body, a radiant mind, a loving heart, and an honorable life.
Stefan Emunds
Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.
Mies Van Der Rohe
Jesus will not accept the common distinction between righteous indignation and unjustifiable anger. The disciple must be entirely innocent of anger, because anger is an offence against both God and his neighbour.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.
Hermann Hesse
....but talking to a ghost about a demon when you’re in a room full of people who can’t see either of them is not to be recommended.
Kerstin Gier
Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy!
Anne Frank
Three times Jan had been called to the colours (the army), but each time had been deferred because of his deplorable physical condition..when every male who could stand halfway erect was being shipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change in posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal
Günter Grass
Ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief.
Erich Fromm
Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.
Friedrich Nietzsche
How can a man become great if he does not feel in himself the force and the will to inflict great pain
Friedrich Nietzsche
Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason.
Paul Tillich
In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.
Heinrich von Kleist
Beryl: Beryl is a warm gemstone which develops, between the third hour and midday, from the foam of water when the sun burns it severely. Its power is thus more from air and water than from fire, but nevertheless it has some of the properties of fire. And if a man has drunk or eaten poison, then he should place a little beryl in spring water and drink it at once. Continue for five days drinking it once a day while fasting, and the poison will foam up through vomiting, or it will pass out of him through the rear.
Hildegard of Bingen
In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.
Karl Marx
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.
Albert Einstein
Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
Friedrich Nietzsche
...the opposite of every truth is just as true! That is to say, any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything that can be thought with the mind and said with words is one-sided, it's all just the half of it, lacking completeness, roundness, or unity.
Hermann Hesse
I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensible for my dialogue with nature.
Caspar David Friedrich
I just realized that sleep sometimes is the only precious wage for the hard working man.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.
Hermann Hesse
Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing, how little so ever it be, if it is suffered for God’s sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.
Thomas à Kempis
Reason deserves to be called a prophet for in showing up the consequence and effect of our actions in the present does it not tell us what the future will be?
Arthur Schopenhauer
The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I try to extract something positive from [every] situation even if it's just learning not to make the same mistake twice.
Claudia Schiffer
Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.
Eckhart Tolle
the first place smelled like work, so I took the second
Charles Bukowski
As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated.
Hannah Arendt
Every word is a prejudice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be you do.
Goethe
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
Karl Marx
Imagine a wall that's green on one side and red on the other. You stand on one side and only see green. I stand on the other side and only see red. We'll both be right about the color we see, even though we disagree on what color the wall is. Being able to realize that the other person has a valid point, even if you disagree with it, that's maturity.
Oliver Gaspirtz
at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again
Werner Herzog
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
Erik Erikson
To be wounded by the suffering of others is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
Gregory Baum
To save all we must risk all.
Friedrich Schiller
Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and being rich.
Marlene Dietrich
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.
Hermann Hesse
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.
Erich Fromm
Men may be linked in friendship. Nations are linked only by interests.
Rolf Hochhuth
Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can't breathe very well in Ireland. He said it makes no sense to hold a stone in your hand. A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English. We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't have just one language and one history. We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.
Hugo Hamilton
There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe