Quotes by German Authors - Page 22

Such a lot is won when even a single man gets to his feet and says No
Bertolt Brecht
There are no facts, only interpretations”“Truth is merely the final illusion” – Nietzsche (2003)Let this not stop us from being faithful to humanity andLoyal to our own duty to be spiritually human. Living within the ethic of reciprocity, or the Golden Rule, Will help us all achieve this goal.
Nietzche Friedrich
It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect....This closedness means that the continuum of historical happenings cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural transcendent powers and that therefore there is no "miracle" in this sense of the word.
Rudolf Karl Bultmann
Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust.
Oliver Markus Malloy
Law and custom are becoming the subjects of a new field of learning. The anarch endeavors to judge them ethnographically, historically, and also – I will probably come back to this – morally. The State will be generally satisfied with him; it will scarcely notice him In this respect he bears a certain resemblance to the criminal – say, the master spy – whose gifts are concealed behind a run-of-the-mill occupation.
Ernst Jünger
... A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopolyof the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Max Weber
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
Hermann Hesse
To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.
Erich Maria Remarque
Man's nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.
Erich Fromm
They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.
Hermann Hesse
why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?
Bernhard Schlink
Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.
Paul Klee
[Alexander von] Humboldt showers us with true treasures.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels and images.
Eckhart Tolle
One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless...
Hermann Hesse
Cursed Mammon be when he with treasures To restless action spurs our fate!
Goethe
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
Hannah Arendt