Quotes by German Authors - Page 9

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless.
Charles Bukowski
The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and in a sense tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother and to become fully independent.
Erich Fromm
The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All right," she said. "Give me the books that are kind to me, and to hell with the men who don't give a damn about me.
Nina George
Psychology has falsified love as surrender and altruism, while it is an appropriation or a bestowal following from a super-abundance of personality. Only the most complete persons can love. The depersonalized and objective are the worst lovers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called "Damn It".
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
When the heart craved something so forcefully, then reason became nothing but helpless observer.
Cornelia Funke
When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.
Karl Lagerfeld
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I could never stop comparing the way it was with Gertrud and the way it had been with Hanna; again and again, Gertrud and I would hold each other, and I would feel that something was wrong, that she was wrong, that she moved wrong and felt wrong, smelled wrong and tasted wrong. I thought I would get over it. I hoped it would go away. I wanted to be free of Hanna. But I never got over the feeling that something was wrong.
Bernhard Schlink
The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.
Wernher von Braun
I felt like a still live fish on ice in a butcher’s counter on Friday morning.- On Cats
Charles Bukowski
I would not think that philosophy and reason themselves will be man's guide in the foreseeable future; however, they will remain the most beautiful sanctuary they have always been for the select few.
Albert Einstein
Woman is at once apple and serpent.
Heinrich Heine
Some of them will, but most of them are willed. Some of them are genuine, but most of them are bad actors.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Divide and rule, the politician cries;Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Morality negates life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
jan was an excellent fuck...she had a tight pussy and she took it like it was a knife that was killing her.
Charles Bukowski
What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
It's asking us our names," Falkor reported."I'm Atreyu!" Atreyu cried."I'm Falkor!" cried Falkor.The boy without a name was silent.Atreyu looked at him, then took him by the hand and cried: "He's Bastian Balthazar Bux!""It asks," Falkor translated, "why he doesn't speak for himself.""He can't," said Atreyu. "He has forgotten everything."Falkor listened again to the roaring of the fountain."Without memory, it says, he cannot come in. The snakes won't let him through."Atreyu replied: "I have stored up everything he told us about himself and his world. I vouch for him."Falkor listened."It wants to know by what right?""I am his friend," said Atreyu.
Michael Ende
No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
Hannah Arendt
People always think it's unprofessional if your appearance doesn't match your biological sex. What does my gender have to do with my skills?
Marcel Weyers
Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable
Friedrich Nietzsche
One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fear is the absence of faith.
Paul Tillich
Loneliness was the price of the quest. I don't belong to the people who cannot live alone
Mies Van Der Rohe
The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.
Arthur Schopenhauer
After the Lord has tried our faith, he, in the love of His heart, gives us an abundance. For the glory of His name and for trial of our faith, He allows us to be poor and then graciously supplies our needs.
George Müller
It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.
Peter Sloterdijk
[T]here is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject … [T]he predicates are not accidents, but express the essence of the subject … [T]he essence of religion … conceives and affirms a profoundly human relation as divine relations[.]
Ludwig Feuerbach
NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life.preface to the second edition of "the world as will and representation
Arthur Schopenhauer
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dreams, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place by E. B. White
Bernd Heinrich
Finally, my watchers had to fess up. In embarrassed and genuinely polite tones, they said they had no other choice but to arrest me. Then they accompanied me to the prison across the way. As I entered, an extremely tall SS man leapt in front of me and asked: “Do you have any weapons?” “Why?” I responded. “Do I need any?
Rudolph Herzog
How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
[Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
Johann von Goethe
I have fooled life and life has fooled me. We are quits. I say good-bye. Think sometimes in the hour of happiness of your poor, comical fool who loved you truly and so well.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Politicians are like dogs... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable
Henry Kissinger
I wait on my fix:I am a poetry junkie.
Charles Bukowski
Grumbling is the death of love.
Marlene Dietrich
Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Cannabis is just way too healthy for a sick health care system
Sebastian Marincolo
beware women grownoldwho were neveranything butyoung
Charles Bukowski
It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.
Hermann Hesse
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The essential thing is to run period!And to do it for a long time and consistently and then everything will take care of itself.
Bernd Heinrich
I did it, and it's all right. Even the worst experiences were right in their time, because otherwise, it wouldn't have come to this point. That was your road, and you had to walk it.
Michael "Bommi" Baumann
A clever man commits no minor blunders.
Johann von Goethe
[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
Jürgen Habermas
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.
Friedrich Nietzsche
That bloody bastard! That thrice accursed son of a bitch!
Cornelia Funke
Speaking generally punishment hardens and numbs it produces concentration it sharpens the consciousness of alienation it strengthens the power of resistance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Why, then, does the man in love hang with complete abandon on the eyes of his chosen one, and is ready to make every sacrifice for her? Because it is his immortal part that longs for her; it is always the mortal part alone that longs for everything else. That eager and even ardent longing, directed to a particular woman, is therefore an immediate pledge of the indestructibility of the kernel of our true nature…”―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 559
Arthur Schopenhauer
Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how thespirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Now this was possible only by a man determining himself entirely *rationally* according to concepts, not according to changing impressions and moods. But as only the maxims of our conduct, not the consequences or circumstances, are in our power, to be capable of always remaining consistent we must take as our object only the maxims, not the consequences and circumstances, and thus the doctrine of virtue is again introduced.”—from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Paye in two volumes: volume I, p. 89
Arthur Schopenhauer
I call architecture 'petrified music'.
Goethe