Quotes by German Authors - Page 3

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann
The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.
Albert Einstein
There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The men history declares heroes are merely heroes because they failed to survive their benevolent acts.
Felix O. Hartmann
that your power of commandwith simple language wasone of the magnificent things ofour century.(from the poem: result)
Charles Bukowski
Boys will always be boys,’ he said. ‘The relationship obviously wasn’t meant to be.’ He told me I should trust that the break-up was for the best, even if I couldn’t see that yet. As with every form of suffering, heartache brings with it catharsis, and turns us into better human beings. ‘It is like an iron in the furnace that is beaten into shape,’ he said. These bad experiences were ultimately a good sign because God tests the ones He loves. That might be why He has so few friends,’ he added dryly. His words cheered me up a bit.
Kristiane Backer
The most visible and often tragic sacrifice of proletarian socialism - not to mention internationalism - on the altar of nationalism, of course, has been by the states that proclaim themselves to be, or to aspire to become, socialist.
André Gunder Frank
...it happens that "society is saved" as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an "assault upon society" and is branded as "Socialism.
Karl Marx
Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.
Karl Marx
Cada época, cada cultura, cada costume e tradição tem seu próprio estilo, tem sua delicadeza e sua severidade, suas belezas e crueldades, aceitam certos sofrimentos como naturais, sofrem pacientemente certas desgraças. O verdadeiro sofrimento, o verdadeiro inferno da vida humana reside ali onde se chocam duas culturas ou duas religiões. Um homem da antiguidade, que tivesse de viver na Idade Média, haveria de sentir-se tão afogado quanto um selvagem se sentiria em nossa civilização. Há momentos em que toda uma geração cai entre dois estilos de vida, e toda evidência, toda moral, toda salvação e inocência ficam perdidos para ela. Naturalmente isso não nos atinge da mesma maneira.
Hermann Hesse
Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Ernst Boris Chain
Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed in the second it is opposed in the third it is regarded as self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Which is better: to dare to look directly into the blinding present, no matter how painful, or to await the detachment of hindsight -- which, being less painful, is more objective?
Thomas Buergenthal
The radiance of this beautiful scene shed a cruel light on every past horror, every insult tolerated, every unspoken retort, every gesture of rejection. Marianne was grieving, and her boundless grief made her regret every moment of cowardice in her life.
Nina George
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.
W.G. Sebald
I went to the kitchen and felt-up the turkey.
Charles Bukowski
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is not a lack of love but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Only air and light and the love of friends! Let no man lose heart who still has these.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Men will get no more out of life than they put into it.
William J. H. Boetcker
One must not hold one's self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one's creations.
Ludwig van Beethoven
The good Lord set definite limits on man's wisdom but set no limits on his stupidity - and that's just not fair.
Konrad Adenauer
For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.
Jürgen Habermas
So what? All writers are lunatics!
Cornelia Funke
What is your advice to young writers?""Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.""What is your advice to older writers?""If you're still alive, you don't need any advice.""What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?""What makes you take a shit?
Charles Bukowski
It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is more, in fact, we very soon look upon the world as something whose non-existence is not only conceivable, but even preferable to its existence. Therefore our astonishment at it easily passes into a brooding over that *fatality* which could nevertheless bring about its existence, and by virtue of which such an immense force as is demanded for the production and maintenance of such a world could be directed so much against its own interest and advantage."―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171
Arthur Schopenhauer
Do not let your peace depend on the words of men. Their thinking well or badly of you does not make you different from what you are. Where are true peace and glory? Are they not in Me? He who neither cares to please men nor fears to displease them will enjoy great peace, for all unrest and distraction of the senses arise out of disorderly love and vain fear.
Thomas à Kempis
A critical attitude, like activity, is one of the fundamental characteristics of our time. Both are interdependent. If the critical attitude should dwindle, there would be more peace and less intelligence, to the benefit of the essential. Neither criticism nor activity, however, can steer the course in such a direction - this means that higher forces are involved.
Ernst Jünger
What is it: is man only a blunder of God or God only a blunder of man?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ah, brothers, this God which I created was human work and human madness, like all gods!He was human, and only a poor piece of man and Ego: this phantom came to me from my own fire and ashes, that is the truth! It did not come from the ‘beyond’!
Friedrich Nietzsche
If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is 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?" Joseph Knect said to his Music Master "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 perfection in yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught
Hermann Hesse
At least I’m the one leaving. It’s so much easier to leave than to be left.
Stefan Emunds
Calm is good, passivity not to much. Calm is always a basic inner attitude that makes it possible to concentrate and act purposefully. But passivity suggest an element of denial. Passive people refuse to take initiatives and to exploit stimuli. They sit and wait - without strength, defiant or rigid from shock - in whatever their situation is and prefer to suffer considerably from their plight rather than trying to change something. This includes boredom and even bad relationships.
Sylvia Loehken
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen few in pursuit of the goal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.
Karl Rahner
Liberation from ego is what we shramanas are seeking, O Exalted One. If I were your disciple, O Venerable One, I'm afraid it might befall me that my ego would be pacified and liberated only seemingly, only illusorily, that in reality it would survive and grow great, for then I would make the teaching, my discipleship, my love for you, and the community of the monks into my ego!
Hermann Hesse
So I had nothing to distract me from my books and their other worlds that swallowed me whole, from Narnia to the Wisconsin woods, from a small town in Sweden to the red earth of Prince Edward Island. Nothing and no one interested me as much as my books.
Luisa Weiss
The "supreme good" and its attainment -- that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.
Josef Pieper
There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Albert Einstein
Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.
Friedrich Nietzsche
An axe at home saves hiring a carpenter.
J. C. F. von Schiller
History is written by the victors.
Walter Benjamin
We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.
Peter Weiss
If you desire to know or learn anything to your advantage, then take delight in being unknown and unregarded.A true understanding and humble estimate of oneself is the highest and most valuable of all lessons. To take no account of oneself, but always to think well and highly of others is the highest wisdom and perfection.
Thomas à Kempis
It is ever true that he who does nothing for others, does nothing for himself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The right man is the one that seizes the moment.
Goethe
If a man is called to be a streetsweep-er he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
Martin Luther King
There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you want to be proud of yourself, then do things in which you can take pride
Karen Horney
Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
Eckhart Tolle
Of course it was not only the law that interfered with our management of the paper. The politicians, too, soon took a hand. The Oberpräsident of Schleswig-Holstein, a man named Kürbis (which is German for pumpkin) forbad its publication; it appeared the next day, entitled Die Westküste [The West Coat]. This too was banned, and for a short time my brother's wish was fulfilled and we edited Die Grüne Front. I, too, had the gratification of seeing my original suggestion realised whn it became, in due course, Die Sturmglocke. Finally, the Oberpräsident forbad us from publishing any paper at all which was not purely concerned with technical agricultural matters. So we rechristened it Der Kürbis, aand the leading article consisted of variations on the subject of pumpking as given in the encyclopaedia; we expatiated on how pumkins flourish best in plenty of dung and on the disagreeable nature of their blossom's scwent. Thenceforth the paper resumed its original name of Das Landvolk and that was that.
Ernst von Salomon
How can we expect our students to become bold and fearless in thought and action if we encase them in sentimental shrines feigning a culture which has long since disappeared?
Walter Gropius
The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.
Adolf Hitler