Quotes by German Authors - Page 31

How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology. They happily began discussions about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, through their tenacity in defending their views, that the subject seemed important to them. Indeed, one should not be surprised at this.
Albert Einstein
This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?
Max Planck
He who is plenteously provided for from within needs but little from without.
Johann von Goethe
When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ordinary people know little of the time and effort it takes to learn to read. I have been eighty years at it and have not reached my goal.
Goethe
In every colour there's the light.In every stone sleeps a crystal.Remember the Shaman, when he used to say:Man is the dream of the dolphin
Enigma
Awaken your heart!
Stefan Emunds
The German people in its whole character is not warlike, but rather soldierly, that is, while they do not want war, they are not frightened by the thoughts of it.
Adolf Hitler
Our knowledge of dynamic processes is necessarily inferior to our ability to describe stationary conditions.
Oskar Morgenstern
Even the sun directs our gaze away from itself and to the life illumined by it.
Eberhard Arnold
Believe me, friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
Albert Schweitzer
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
Patrick Süskind
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
They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
Theodor W. Adorno
What he had hoped for was his ruin and what he had feared his salvation.
Michael Ende
O sky above me, you modest, glowing sky! O you, my happiness before sunrise! Day is coming: so let us part!
Friedrich Nietzsche
For it is the bitter grief of theology and its blessed task, too, always to have to seek (because it does not clearly have present to it at the time)...always providing that one has the courage to ask questions, to be dissatisfied, to think with the mind and heart one ACTUALLY has, and not with the mind and heart one is SUPPOSED TO have.
Karl Rahner
Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.
Erich Fromm
It's in the anomalies that nature reveals its secrets.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything is just how I imagined it, yet everything is new
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Conflict is not unavoidable. However, it is nonsensical to consider the institution of a state as a solution to the problem of possible conflict, because it is precisely the institution of a state which first makes conflict unavoidable and permanent.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Beryl: Beryl is a warm gemstone which develops, between the third hour and midday, from the foam of water when the sun burns it severely. Its power is thus more from air and water than from fire, but nevertheless it has some of the properties of fire. And if a man has drunk or eaten poison, then he should place a little beryl in spring water and drink it at once. Continue for five days drinking it once a day while fasting, and the poison will foam up through vomiting, or it will pass out of him through the rear.
Hildegard of Bingen
being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
Charles Bukowski
Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.
Iwan Goll
... A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopolyof the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Max Weber
Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.
Eckhart Tolle
What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.
Charles Bukowski
Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.
Heinrich Heine
No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much.
Jean Paul Richter
The actor passed him his cigarette case. "No, you must tell us all about it. One should always be reminded of the fact that even in this best of worlds the blood still flows freely.""The Dead Jew
Hanns Heinz Ewers
By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.
Angelus Silesius
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
True religion ... is giving and finding one's happiness by bringing happiness into the lives of others.
William J. H. Boetcker
Geometria est archetypus pulchritudinis mundi-Mathematics is the archetype of the beauty of the world-Kepler
Kepler
One lost easiest what one held in one’s arms— never what one left.
Erich Maria Remarque
Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self created suffering comes to an end.
Eckhart Tolle
The essence and value of the law lies in its stability and durability (...), in its “relative eternity.” Only then does the legislator’s self-limitation and the independence of the law-bound judge find an anchor. The experiences of the French Revolution showed how an unleashed pouvoir législatif could generate a legislative orgy.
Carl Schmitt
Man is the only animal that can be bored.
Erich Fromm
The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.
Cornelia Funke
The child starts out by being attached to his mother as "the ground of all being." He feels helpless and needs the all-enveloping love of mother. He then turns to father as the new center of his affections, father being a guiding principle for thought and action; in this stage he is motivated by the need to acquire father's praise, and to avoid his displeasure. In the stage of full maturity he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers; he has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother; he is father and mother. In the history of the human race we see—and can anticipate—the same development: from the beginning of the love for God as the helpless attachment to a mother Goddess, through the obedient attachment to a fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense.
Erich Fromm
Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the very people we trusted most - our parents, teachers, leaders.
Erich Fromm
A timid person is frightened before a danger a coward during the time and a courageous person afterwards.
Jean Paul Richter
A man can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days.
Johann von Goethe
If once he has got the right fingering, plays in good time, with the notes fairly correct, then only pull him up about the rendering; and when he has arrived at that stage, don’t let him stop for the sake of small faults, but point them out to him when he has played the piece through. . . I have always adopted this plan; it soon forms musicians which, after all, is one of the first aims of art and it gives less trouble both to master and pupil.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Nothing, how little so ever it be, if it is suffered for God’s sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.
Thomas à Kempis
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.
Hermann Hesse
Everyone needs help from everyone.
Bertolt Brecht
Sleeping is no mean art. For its sake one must stay awake all day.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Books are never harmless...they either strengthen us or they weaken us in our faith. Some of them do this even as they entertain us, others as they teach us. In an invisible way their teaching penetrates into our hearts and souls, to continue its work inside, and we inhale the spirit of these books as healing or poisonous vapors. They can bring the greatest benefits and the greatest ruin, for from their ideas that they spread come the deeds of the future.
Peter Prange
In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.
Friedrich Schiller
I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, I can't do anything to change events anyway.
Anne Frank
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Albert Einstein
The discipline gave me a sense of achievement. Not least, fasting is a test of willpower and, whenever I felt my willpower weakening, I would tell myself that I could eat as much as I wanted after sunset. But then the strange thing was that after fasting all day long, I tended to feel full with just a small snack.
Kristiane Backer
Gaiety alone as it were is the hard cash of happiness everything else is just a promissory note.
Arthur Schopenhauer
German is a much more precise language than English. Americans throw the word love around for everything: I love my wife! I love all my friends! I love rock music! I love the rain! I love comic books! I love peanut butter! The word you use to describe your feelings for your wife should not be the same word you use to describe your feelings for peanut butter. In German, there are a dozen different words that describe varying degrees of liking something a lot. Germans almost never use the word love, unless they mean a deep romantic love. I have never told my parents I love them, because it would sound melodramatic, inappropriate, and almost incestuous. In German, you tell your mother that you hold her very dear, not that you are in love with her.
Oliver Markus
Alles ist Service und ohne Service ist Alles nichts.
Carsten K. Rath