Quotes by German Authors - Page 30

To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.
Erich Fromm
Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law...
Martin Luther
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
Mies Van Der Rohe
If there were nothing but thought in you. You wouldn't even know your thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he's dreaming. You would be as identified with thought as a dreamer is with every image in the dream.
Eckhart Tolle
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.
Karl Marx
On top of the world, or in the depths of despair.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All the games were selected for them by supervisors and had to have some useful, educational purpose. The children learned these new games but unlearned something else in the process: they forgot to be happy, how to take pleasure in little things and last, but not least, how to dream
Michael Ende
Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.
Meister Eckhart
The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.
Otto von Bismarck
Nobody has ever killed themselves over a broken arm. But every day, thousands of people kill themselves because of a broken heart. Why? Because emotional pain hurts much worse than physical pain.
Oliver Markus
Jesus will not accept the common distinction between righteous indignation and unjustifiable anger. The disciple must be entirely innocent of anger, because anger is an offence against both God and his neighbour.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
we wish you everything you wish yourself' Jurgen said.'What do you wish yourself?' Birgit asked.I felt silly 'I don't really have any specific wishes''a new old man perhaps?' Juliet said playfully'but please, not just any old man!' I said.'of course not just any old man! The man with whom it'll all be different.
Eva Heller
in this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck
Charles Bukowski
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
Hermann Hesse
Music heals all forms of misery
Friedrich Nietzsche
He had to hold his body very still, very still, like some vessel about to slosh over from too much motion. Gradually he managed to get control of his breathing. His excited heart beat more steadily; the pounding of the waves inside him subsided slowly. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusky reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened, and he entered. The next performance in the theatre of his soul was beginning.
Patrick Süskind
God made man simple but how he changed and got complicated is hard to say.
Johann von Goethe
If I don't eat junk, I don't gain weight.
Paulina Christensen
What’s going on outside, Ravic?” “Nothing new, Kate. The world goes on eagerly preparing for suicide and at the same time deluding itself about what it’s doing.” “Will there be war?” “Everyone knows that there will be war. What one does not yet know is when. Everyone expects a miracle.” Ravic smiled. “Never before have I seen so many politicians who believe in miracles as at present in France and England. And never so few as in Germany.” She remained lying silent for a while. “To think that it should be possible—” she said then. “Yes— it seems so impossible that it will happen some day. Just because one considers it so impossible and doesn’t protect oneself against it.
Erich Maria Remarque
How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?
Thomas Mann
Never use the word “cheap”. Today everybody can look chic in inexpensive clothes (the rich buy them too). There is good clothing design on every level today. You can be the chicest thing in the world in a T-shirt and jeans — it’s up to you.
Karl Lagerfeld
Once we are lost unto ourselves, everything else is lost to us.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.
Friedrich Schiller
In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
Theodor W. Adorno
It is not that God's help and presence must still be proved in our life; rather God's presence and help have been demonstrated for us in the life of Jesus Christ. It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, in God's Son Jesus Christ, than to discover what God intends for us today. The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I will die. And the fact that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, will be raised on the day of judgment
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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
man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity
Paul Tillich
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
Karl Marx
All one can really leave one's children is what's inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.
Wernher von Braun
Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances”, this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, … this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols - like and consistent amongst themselves - belongs most definitely not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures. Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There - it must be.
Oswald Spengler
You only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character
Anne Frank
I once saw many flowers blooming Upon my way, in indolence I scorned to pick them in my going And passed in proud indifference.Now, when my grave is dug, they taunt me; Now, when I'm sick to death in pain, In mocking torment still they haunt me, Those fragrant blooms of my disdain.
Heinrich Heine
Science without religion is lame religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
Muoth was right. On growing old, one becomes more contented than in one's youth, which I will not therefore revile, for in all my dreams I hear my youth like a wonderful song which now sounds more harmonious than it did in reality, and even sweeter
Hermann Hesse
Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermost essence of talent.
Thomas Mann
Sometimes my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run from this. It waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there.
Klaus Kinski
As a recluse I couldn't bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.
Charles Bukowski
If a man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.
Goethe
One man's word is no man's word we should quietly hear both sides.
Goethe
If we would answer the question of the existence of the Evil then we would not be sinners, we could make something else responsible.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Applaud my friends, the comedy is over...[on his death bed]
Ludwig van Beethoven
As soon as you trust yourself you will know how to live.
Johann von Goethe
Christian life consists in faith and charity.
Martin Luther
I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.
Thomas Mann
There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were.
Charles Bukowski
Very few great artists feel the giant agony of the world.
Edith Hamilton
Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The stakes in this game are not low. Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language, and with the language an altered perspective, for a group of phenomena that tradition tended to refer to with such words as 'spirituality', 'piety', 'morality', 'ethics' and 'asceticism'. If the manoeuvre succeeds, the conventional concept of religion, that ill-fated bugbear from the prop studios of modern Europe, will emerge from these investigations as the great loser. Certainly intellectual history has always resembled a refuge for malformed concepts - and after the following journey through the various stations, one will not only see through the concept of 'religion' in its failed design, a concept whose crookedness is second only to the hyper-bugbear that is 'culture'.
Peter Sloterdijk
A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.
Rudolf Carnap
Misfortunes never come singly.
Anne Frank
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures - of these 3 000 are in existence.
Wilhelm Bode
If in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be 'devout' and to perform my 'religious duties', then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely 'proper', but loveless.
Pope Benedict XVI
It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)
Hermann Hesse
Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws and obey them space will treat you kindly. And don't tell me man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go - and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.
Wernher von Braun
There may not be a hell, but those who judge may create one. I think people are over-taught. They are over-taught everything. You have to find out by what happens to you, how you will react. I’ll have to use a strange term here… “good.” I don’t know where it comes from, but I feel that there’s an ultimate strain of goodness born in each of us. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in this “goodness” like a tube running through our bodies. It can be nurtured. It’s always magic, when on a freeway packed with traffic, a stranger makes room for you to change lanes… it gives you hope.
Charles Bukowski