Quotes by German Authors - Page 34

Everything has changed. . . except the way we think. The aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problems
Albert Einstein
Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.
Albert Schweitzer
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
Ludwig Feuerbach
The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals ...
Oswald Spengler
Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Besides Zeus on his throne, Justice has her seat.
Edith Hamilton
So be careful when you bend over.
Charles Bukowski
Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
Albert Einstein
Instruction does much, but encouragement everyt
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best—in a way that cost them nothing. And that is why they let us down so badly. …in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness the first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. While they continued to write and talk, we saw the dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards—they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.
Erich Maria Remarque
‎What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and work flow.
Martin Luther
Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the "thoroughness of his understanding.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.
Arthur Schopenhauer
We make our own truths and lies....Truths are often lies and lies truths...
Bernhard Schlink
God be with you.''Thanks, but I think, in battle, I prefer Satan’s company.
Robert Thier
A thing can only live through a pious illusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One should use common words to say uncommon things
Arthur Schopenhauer
There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.
Martin Luther
Every past is worth condemning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[Alexander von] Humboldt showers us with true treasures.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
Günter Grass
Being faithful and monogamous is not natural for human beings. It takes work. Deep down we all know that. We have all been tempted to stray at some point or another. Even when it was only a fleeting thought and we didn't act on it. Every time we acknowledge that someone of the opposite sex is "attractive" or "sexy" we are doing nothing other than pointing out that they would be a suitable mate. Not acting on that natural impulse to want to mate with a viable mating partner requires a conscious decision. It's a constant struggle between what your body wants, and what the civilized part of your brain says you should do, in order to avoid the negative consequences of cheating on your spouse and ruining your long-term relationship. That's why affairs, and extra-marital sex, are often referred to as "a moment of weakness.
Oliver Markus
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
Thomas Mann
They swore by concrete. They built for eternity.
Günter Grass
I refuse to try to explain everything because if you know too much about yourself you become impotent. Better not to know what it is that makes you tick.
Paul Wunderlich
The voice of the majority is no proof of justice
Friedrich Schiller
You can do what you will: but at each given moment of your life you can will only one determined thing and by no means anything other than this one.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The man who pursues moral ends with unmoral means is involved in acontradiction of motives, and nullifies the object at which he aims,since he denies it by his actions.
Fredrich Von Bernhardi
How love works: Proximity leads to intimacy, and intimacy leads to a relationship. In other words, people who are around each other a lot, get close, and end up hooking up. So it's no great mystery why bosses and secretaries or co-workers or classmates end up dating each other.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.
Erich Fromm
The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche
where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die,
Charles Bukowski
It is better to be deceived by one's friends than to deceive them.
Goethe
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
Erich Maria Remarque
Love means to commit oneself without guarantee to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
Erich Fromm
Capitalist production...was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this.
Friedrich Engels
But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.Whether such a thing occurs or does not occur, this depends solely on whether we as a historical-spiritual Volk will ourselves, still and again, or whether we will ourselves no longer. Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision.But it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission.
Martin Heidegger
For me, Chanel is like music. There are certain notes and you have to make another tune with them
Karl Lagerfeld
We -humans - are wizard who turn miracles into technology.
Stefan Emunds
at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again
Werner Herzog
Thinking, he walked ever more slowly and asked himself, What is it now that you were hoping to learn from doctrines and teachers, and what is it that they—who taught you so much—were unable to teach you? And, he decided, It was the Self whose meaning and nature I wished to learn. It was the Self I wished to escape from, wished to overcome. But I was unable to overcome it, I could only trick it, could only run away from it and hide. Truly, not a single thing in all the world has so occupied my thoughts as this Self of mine, this riddle: that I am alive and that I am One, am different and separate from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And there is not a thing in the world about which I know less than about myself, about Siddhartha!
Hermann Hesse
One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Born into thisInto hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to dieInto lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guiltyInto a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closedInto a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes...
Charles Bukowski
Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!
Martin Luther
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Albert Einstein
The materialists, or some of them, would have us believe that the brain produces thoughts as an organ secretes fluids; this is to overlook What constitutes the very essence of thought, namely the materially unexplainable miracle of subjectivity: as if the cause of consciousness - immaterial and non-spatial by definition - could be a material object.
Frithjof Schuon
Boredom is rage spread thin.
Paul Tillich
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man who needs the unusual to make him "wonder" shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being. The itch for sensation, even though disguised in the mask of Boheme, is a sure indication of a bourgeois mind and a deadened sense of wonder.
Josef Pieper
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
Bertolt Brecht
You’ve been tested.’ He advised me to try and ‘forgive and pardon, and this way seek to become beloved by God’ without my forgiveness being tied to the one who wronged me. ‘This is the Divine remedy,’ he emphasised, ‘remind your ego when it resists. Don’t you love for God to forgive you on the day, too?’ Reflecting on what the Shaykh said, his advice undid a knot in my heart and I resolved to work on my forgiveness purely for the sake of God. The Shaykh also recommended: ‘Be careful about what you pray for in the future.’ He promised to pray for me personally, asking God to send me a Muslim husband who would value and cherish me for who I am. Insha’ Allah!
Kristiane Backer
Never chase people. Be you and the right people who belong in your life and deserve a place in your heart will come, find and appreciate you!
Lily Amis
The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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
I always felt it wouldpass.I listened to the charges against meknowing some of them to be truebut certainly notimportant enoughto become the target ofviolence, envy,vengeance.I thought it would surelypass.
Charles Bukowski
I think of you when upon the sea the sun flings her beams.I think of you when the moonlight shines in silvery streams.I see you when upon the distant hills the dust awakes;At night when on a fragile bridge the traveler quakes.I hear you when the billows rise on high,With murmur deep.To tread the silent grove where wander I,When all's asleep.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is talk of a new astrologer [Nicolaus Copernicus] who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth.[Martin Luther stating his objection to heliocentrism due to his Scripture's geocentrism]
Martin Luther
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche