Quotes by German Authors - Page 7

Trust is a word created by liars.
Christian Julch
Everyone is the other and no one is himself.
Martin Heidegger
Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless he doubts that he is acceptable, and why should a young, educated and successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves because they are not themselves.
Erich Fromm
Chains of gold are still chains.
Robert Thier
there's no clarity.there was never meant to be clarity.
Charles Bukowski
What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!
Erich Maria Remarque
Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
Theodor Adorno
I'm now a bit anti-Jewish since my last visit to the synagogue, but my atheism does not necessarily reject religion.
Jack Steinberger
In practice it is death that works soseductively behind the image of its brother, sleep
Friedrich Nietzsche
One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
As I'd seen over and again, people who see themselves as victims sometimes don't notice when they become oppressors.
Souad Mekhennet
Even if mankind can go on without them, a piece of our vibrantly diverse world dies along with each species.
Dieter Braun
since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light
Charles Bukowski
Lose your mind and come to your senses.
Frederick Salomon Perls
The illegal we do immediately the unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry Kissinger
Life's objective is life itself.
Johann von Goethe
Christian life consists in faith and charity.
Martin Luther
Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!
Anne Frank
I set about seeking a thread, a theme, a style, in the realm of legend. Something that might allow me to give free rein to my juvenile sense of romanticism and the beautiful image.
Leni Riefenstahl
The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears—because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared.
Erich Fromm
Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.
Friedrich Schiller
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed
Arthur Schopenhauer
If you wish to learn from the theoretical physicist anything about the methods which he uses, I would give you the following piece of advice: Don't listen to his words, examine his achievements. For to the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities.
Albert Einstein
The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.
Erich Fromm
Religion is also a process of healing, I discovered – a healing of the soul. Even our language points to this relation. The words ‘holy’, ‘wholesome’ and ‘healing’ all have the same root. (In German, this is even more striking: heilig, heil and heilen.) Muslims believe that all humans are born in a state of purity, our fitra, and it is only in the course of our lives that we tarnish our soul through bad habits and wrong behaviour. Through spiritual practices such as prayer, recitation of Quran and dhikr we can cleanse these acquired ‘black spots’ in our soul and return towards our original primordial nature. More so, dhikr is said to enliven the heart.
Kristiane Backer
Honesty is the key to Happiness. Be always truthful to yourself, to your feelings, emotions, needs and desires & to others, no matter what!
Lily Amis
Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it. The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die." (The Faith of a Heretic)
Walter Kaufmann
Since then your sere Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me.
Martin Luther
I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care
Charles Bukowski
I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function.
Erich Fromm
And so Gotama wandered into the town to obtain alms, and the two Samanas recognized him only by his complete peacefulness of demeanor, by the stillness of his form, in which there was no seeking, no will, no counterfeit, no effort - only light and peace.
Hermann Hesse
You are awareness, disguised as a person.
Eckhart Tolle
It is becoming a bad dream-- in the daytime as well as at night. I see him nearly all the time and can't get at him, I mustn't show anything, must remain gay while I'm really in despair.
Anne Frank
The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When you fall head over heels for someone, you’re not falling in love with who they are as a person; you’re falling in love with your idea of love.
Elisabeth Rohm
This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God.
Paul Tillich
Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment.
Eckhart Tolle
The true artist is not proud, he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun. I would, perhaps, rather come to you and your people, than to many rich folk who display inward poverty.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in Wüzburg, I arrived at the front, which by that time had already crossed the Rhine into Germany. There were well over a hundred in my company, all of whom were very young. One evening the company commander sent me with a message to battalion headquarters. I wandered all night long through destroyed, burning villages and farms, and when in the morning I returned to my company I found only the dead, nothing but dead, overrun by a combined bomber and tank assault. I could see only dead and empty faces, where the day before I had shared childhood fears and youthful laughter. I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day, and behind this memory all my childhood dreams crumble away.
Johann Baptist Metz
for meobedience to another is the decay of self.for though every being is similareach being is differentand to herd our differencesunder one lawdegrades each self.
Charles Bukowski
Meeting him was a miracle. He was a precious gift sent from God from heaven above!
Lily Amis
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.
Eckhart Tolle
Thus [the altar] brings heaven into the community assembled on earth, or rather it takes the community beyond itself into the communion of saints of all times and places. We might put it this way: the altar is the place where heaven is opened up.
Pope Benedict XVI
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
For the soul, understand, is itself the whole world.
Edgar Maass
Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.
Christof Koch
Or is what remains in me like a defeated army,Fleeing in disarray from victory already won?
Bonhoeffer Dietrich
So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's.
Friedrich Nietzsche
With most people doubt about one thing is simply blind belief in another.
G. C. Lichtenberg
It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.
Hermann Hesse
The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To talk about the senselessness of the battle was to attribute sense to war itself.
Sten Nadolny
Liebe macht nicht blind. Der Liebende sieht nur weit mehr als da ist.
Oliver Hassencamp
The world is an ambitious business. It continuously expands and evolves. But people are lazy and God is far too lovely to do something about it.
Stefan Emunds
As an anarch, who acknowledges neither law nor custom, I owe it to myself to get at the very heart of things. I then probe them in terms of their contradictions, like image and mirror image. Either is imperfect – by seeking to unite them, which I practice every morning, I manage to catch a corner of reality.
Ernst Jünger
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
Max Planck
Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love a cow - for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advantage.
Meister Eckhart
If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.
Eckhart Tolle
Being rejected by someone you knew you never stood a chance with is like pouring salt on a wound that already has salt in it. It preserves the hurt.
Maria G. Cope