Quotes by German Authors - Page 4

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.
Meister Eckhart
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
Karl Marx
I cannot now recall exactly what creatures I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but there were probably bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi Desert, native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums, pine martens, dormice, and lemurs, leaping from branch to branch, darting back and forth over the grayish-yellow sandy ground, or disappearing into a bamboo thicket. The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.
W.G. Sebald
I think I need a drink.''Almost everybody does only they don't know it.
Charles Bukowski
People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
Charles Bukowski
The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses ... the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. The perfect thing is that which articulates an entire principle of being. The poem has to perform no more and no less than to perceive the principle of being in the thing and adapt it to its own existence - with the aim of becoming a construct with an equal power to convey a message.
Peter Sloterdijk
Information is not knowledge.
Albert Einstein
The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?
Anne Frank
I have awaited a storm that should deliver me, pluck me away and now it has come softly, even without my knowledge. But it is here. While I was despairing, thinking everything lost, it was already quietly growing. I had thought that division was always an end. Now I know that growth also is division. And growth means relinquishing. And growth has no end.
Erich Maria Remarque
Store speculates:Some creative people… of predominantly schizoid or depressive temperaments... use their creative capacities in a defensive way. If creative work protects a man from mental illness, it is a small wonder that he pursues it with avidity. The schizoid state... Is characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and futility. For most people, interaction with others provides most of what they require to find meaning and significance in life. For the schizoid person, however, this is not the case. Creative activity is a particularly apt way to express himself... The activity is solitary... [but] the ability to create and the productions which result from such ability are generally regarded as possessing value by our society.
Sylvia Nasar
The practice of medicine is a thinker's art the practice of surgery a plumber's.
Martin H. Fisher
The real difference in the believer who follows Christ and has mortified his will and died after the old man in Christ, is that he is more clearly aware than other men of the rebelliousness and perennial pride of the flesh, he is conscious of his sloth and self-indulgence and knows that his arrogance must be eradicated. Hence there is a need for daily self-discipline.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.
Adolf Hitler
Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.
W.G. Sebald
Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting
Erich Maria Remarque
Asking the question of being is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the awakening of spirit and hence for an originary world of historical Dasein. It is indispensable if the peril of world-darkening [Weltverdüsterung] is to be forestalled and if our Volk at the center of the West is to take on its historical mission.
Martin Heidegger
There's a light somewhere.It may not be much light butit beats the darkness.
Charles Bukowski
How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?
Arthur Schopenhauer
I was not a good scholar, and during my last year at school I made little effort. This was not due to laziness … , but to a state of youthful day-dreaming and indifference … that was only … pierced when creative desire enveloped me like ether.
Hermann Hesse
It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Forgiveness is too easy. I can forget by indifference, but not forgive. I prefer revenge.
Karl Lagerfeld
If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all. ... How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore – and then you get something out of her
Karl Lagerfeld
By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.
Karl Marx
A true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself but for his neighbor. Therefore the whole spirit of his life him impels him to do even that which he needs not do, but which is profitable and necessary for his neighbor.
Martin Luther
I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.
Hermann Hesse
Searching means having a goal, but finding means being free, being open, having no goal ... because in striving for your goal there are many things you do not see, which are directly in front of your eyes.
Hermann Hesse
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
Arthur Schopenhauer
One day, my father said there was nothing outside infinity. He said the universe was like a cardboard box with God sitting outside surrounded by light, but I wanted to know if maybe God was sitting inside another cardboard box with the light on, and how could anyone be sure how many cardboard boxes there are.
Hugo Hamilton
Just beacause I'm wearing revealing clothes doesn't mean I'm inviting them to look.
Cora Reilly
The human heart has a way of thinking that it is always in the right and has no need to weep over its sins. By nature, we are self-confident and impenitent. We blame others or even accuse God when we do not understand His ways.
M. Basilea Schlink
Hauriou, became a crown witness for us when he confirmed this connection in 1916, in the midst of WWI: “The revolution of 1789 had no other goal than absolute access to the writing of legal statutes and the systematic destruction of customary institutions. It resulted in a state of permanent revolution because the mobility of the writing of laws did not provide for the stability of certain customary institutions, because the forces of change were stronger than the forces of stability. Social and political life in France was completely emptied of institutions and was only able to provisionally maintain itself by sudden jolts spurred by the heightened morality.
Carl Schmitt
Your heart doesn’t like shady strategies.
Stefan Emunds
I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you.
Charles Bukowski
As seasons change, life changes!
Lily Amis
Sometimes I see myself driving through hell with this wagon and selling brimstone. And sometimes I’m driving through heaven handing our provisions to wandering souls! If only we could find a place where there’s no shooting, me and my children—what’s left of ‘em—we might rest a while.
Bertolt Brecht
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. And if a guy is paying attention to you, he wants to have sex with you.
Oliver Markus
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Eckhart Tolle
A promise to love someone forever, then, means, 'As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.' Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one's fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason
Paul Tillich
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
Albert Einstein
God will pardon me. It's his business.
Heinrich Heine
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
Albert Einstein
I am my own heaven and hell!
J. C. F. von Schiller
Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how or where they grew up, once they get to the audition, all the actresses act in the same way and read the same lines. They all become the same character.
Oliver Markus
The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights.
Hannah Arendt
The polarity between the male and female principles exists also within each man and each woman. Just as physiologically man and woman each have hormones of the opposite sex, they are bisexual also in the psychological sense. They carry in themselves the principle of receiving and of penetrating, of matter and of spirit. Man—and woman—finds union within himself only in the union of his female and his male polarity. This polarity is the basis for all creativity.
Erich Fromm
I do not think we have a "right" to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks.
Marlene Dietrich
My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death.
Erich Maria Remarque
optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.
Walter Benjamin
The king reigns but does not govern.
Otto von Bismarck
We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know. When my mother says to me "dear boy," it means much more than when another uses it.
Erich Maria Remarque
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
Hermann Hesse
The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.
Bert Hölldobler
Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he'll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough.
Hermann Hesse
Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.
Karl Lagerfeld