Quotes by German Authors - Page 16

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.
Eckhart Tolle
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
Günter Grass
I needed a vacation. I needed 5 women. I needed to get the wax out of my ears. My car needed an oil change. I'd failed to file my damned income tax. One of the stems had broken off of my reading glasses. There were ants in my apartment. I needed to get my teeth cleaned. My shoes were run down at the heels. I had insomnia. My auto insurance had expired. I cut myself every time i shaved. I hadn't laughed in 6 years. I tended to worry when there was nothing to worry about. And when there was something to worry about, i got drunk.
Charles Bukowski
I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration than those which I now enjoy. I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning. The only drawbacks to this solitude are the want of information on the progress of scientific discovery in Europe and the lack of all the advantages arising from an interchange of ideas.
Alexander von Humboldt
It's like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking.
Charles Bukowski
I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am me. And if by chance we find each other, it will be beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.
Frederick Salomon Perls
No one could honestly say that a musical makes sense.
Siegfried Kracauer
The mind knows only what lies near the heart.
Edith Hamilton
If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved
Friedrich Nietzsche
It's hard to argue over money when a girl flashes you her pussy.
Oliver Markus Malloy
Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?
Friedrich Nietzsche
One thing, however, did become clear to him—why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing—mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery.
Hermann Hesse
She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.
Charles Bukowski
Nihil est sine ratione.[There is nothing without a reason.]
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?
Hugo Ball
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
Hannah Arendt
And how does one basically recognize good development? In that a well-developed man does our senses good: that he is carved from wood which is hard, delicate, and sweet-smelling, all at the same time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science... This loosening of thinking seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world.
Max Born
Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.
Martin Luther King
Atreyu was fighting not for himself, but for his friend, whom he was trying to save by defeating him.
Michael Ende
I realize that some people will not believe that a child of little more than ten years is capable of having such feelings. My story is not intended for them. I am telling it to those who have a better knowledge of man. The adult who has learned to translate a part of his feelings into thoughts notices the absence of these thoughts in a child, and therefore comes to believe that the child lacks these experiences, too. Yet rarely in my life have I felt and suffered as deeply as at that time.
Hermann Hesse
The peril of the hour moved the British to tremendous exertions just as always in a moment of extreme danger things can be done which had previously been thought impossible. Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
If thou art willing to suffer no adversity, how wilt thou be the friend of Christ?
Thomas à Kempis
A reasonable man needs only to practice moderation to find happiness.
Johann von Goethe
It is a great priviledge to hear from the mouth of an initiate what struggles we are ensnared in and what the meaning is of the sacrifices we are required to make before veiled images. Even if we should hear something evil, it would still be a blessing to see our task as something beyond a senseless cycle of recurrence.
Ernst Jünger
The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.
Albert Einstein
I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
Arthur Holitscher
Education stuffs you full of ideas without the coinciding experience that gave rise to those ideas in the first place, giving you incorrect perspective and notions.
Arthur Schopenhauer
How can one explain this trend towards a more colorless and shallow life? Well, the work was easier, if less healthy, and it brought in more money, more leisure, and perhaps more entertainment. A day in the country is long and hard. And yet the fruits of their present life were worthless compared to a single coin of their former life: a rest in the evening and a rural festivity. That they no longer knew the old kind of happiness was obvious from the discontentment which spread over their features. Soon dissatisfaction, prevailing over all their other moods, became their religion.
Ernst Jünger
Even if mankind can go on without them, a piece of our vibrantly diverse world dies along with each species.
Dieter Braun
One can pass on knowledge but not wisdom. One can find wisdom, one can live it, one can be supported by it, one can work wonders with it, but one cannot speak it or teach it.
Hermann Hesse
At one point in your life you have to decide whether you want to become a sachem or a solitary.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
The purpose of marriage is not to have pleasure and to be idle, but to procreate and bring up children, to support a household. This, of course, is a huge burden full of great cares and toils. But you have been created by God to be a husband or a wife that you may learn to bear these troubles. Those who have no love for children are... unworthy of being called men or women; for they despise the blessing of God, the creator and author of marriage.
Martin Luther
What a person considers the minimal necessities depends as much on his character as it depends on his actual possessions.
Erich Fromm
Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.
Karl Marx
The laws of gravity cannot be held responcible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein
Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
Werner Herzog
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
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last bath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony,until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.
W.G. Sebald
Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.
Eckhart Tolle
It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!
Friedrich Nietzsche
To send light into the darkness of men's hearts--such is the duty of the artist.
Robert Schumann
Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold?
Friedrich Nietzsche
If I love freedom above all else, then any commitment becomes a metaphor, a symbol. This touches on the difference between the forest fleer and the partisan:this distinction is not qualitative but essential in nature. The anarch is closer to Being. The partisan moves within the social or national party structure, the anarch is outside of it. Of course, the anarch cannot elude the party structure, since he lives in society.
Ernst Jünger
Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.
Ludwig van Beethoven
But since Kurdistan did not, as such, exist; since it was an imaginary land, stretching over scraggy mountains and deep valleys in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria; since they were as landless as the Palestinians and as nameless as the Liberians, the Kurds didn't really exist either, and so, officially, they were Turks.
Sophie Hardach
Where words leave off, music begins.
Heinrich Heine
I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,if there were not a friend?The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
Adolf Hitler
I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn't say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.
Charles Bukowski
But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual, the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
Hermann Hesse
to understand pretending," Ombric was fond of saying, "is to conquer all barriers of time and space.
William Joyce
When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.
Charles Bukowski
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good thing for the first time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Abide not with dualism,Carefully avoid pursuing it;As soon as you have right and wrong,Confusion ensues, and Mind is lost. (172)
Edward Conze
Knowing one's 'individuality'. - We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression that we make.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
By Fortune's adverse buffets overborneTo solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn,And not in utter loneliness to live,Myself at last did to the Devil give!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.
Martin Luther