Quotes by German Authors - Page 35

It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.
Erich Maria Remarque
There is a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out.
Charles Bukowski
there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?
Arthur Schopenhauer
...the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.
Eckhart Tolle
Honor women! they entwine and weave heavenly roses in our earthly life.
Friedrich von Schiller
Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off when you stop growing, because childhood is all gone. And they grow back when you shrivel up, because love is all gone. Leaves spring up at will, writes Lola, just like tall grass. Two or three children in the village don't have any leaves, and those have a big childhood. A child like that is an only child, because it has a father and a mother who have been to school. The leaf-fleas turn older children into younger ones - a four-year-old into a three-year-old, a three-year-old into a one-year-old. Even a six-months-old, writes Lola, and even a newborn. And the more little brothers and sisters the leaf-fleas make, the smaller the childhood becomes.
Herta Müller
Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial
Arthur Schopenhauer
Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
Theodor W. Adorno
Now let us look to the ancient inhabitants of India. With them, first of all, religion was not only one interest by the side of many. It was the all-absorbing interest; it embraced not only worship and prayer, but what we call philosophy, morality, law, and government, —all was pervaded by religion. Their whole life was to them a religion—everything else was, as it were, a mere concession made to the ephemeral requirements of this life.
Friedrich Max Müller
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... It is mystery I love and pursue.
Hermann Hesse
When the time has come, every leaf turns to face the sun!It doesn't know if it has to, but because the call has reached it:Not knowing what to expect, it will, move slightly, twist patientlyand try to embrace whatever is coming! It might be too strong, it might be too weak, it also might just be perfect!
Akilnathan Logeswaran
Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.
Walter Kaufmann
Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how or where they grew up, once they get to the audition, all the actresses act in the same way and read the same lines. They all become the same character.
Oliver Markus
The African continent has so many stories to tell, it's about time they are told, by them - not us.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is simpler and easier to flatter men than to praise them.
Jean Paul Richter
We are never further from our wishes than when we imagine that we possess what we have desired.
Johann von Goethe
It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.
Eric Hobsbawm
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Two thoughts cannot coexist at the same time: if the clear light of mindfulness is present, there is no room for mental twilight.
Nyanaponika Thera
Glamour is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way mentally and physically and in appearance and that whatever the occasion or the situation you are equal to it.
Marlene Dietrich
To save all we must risk all.
Friedrich Schiller
To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.
Gerhard Richter
What's foreign one can't always keep quite clear of,For good things, oft, are not so near;A German can't endure the French to see or hear of,Yet drinks their wines with hearty cheer.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The more you let yourself go the less others let you go.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
W.G. Sebald
Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
Walter Kaufmann
940Home is not where you live but where they understand you.
Christian Morgenstern
Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Thomas Mann
Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore – and then you get something out of her
Karl Lagerfeld
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
Hannah Arendt
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.
Catherine the Great
WoyzeckYes, Captain, virtue! That I haven't figured out yet. I'm just a poor guy. The likes of us are wretched in this world and the next. If we ever got to heaven, we'd have to help make the thunder.
Georg Büchner
Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.
Max Weber
The Artist," an ancient sage had once said, "is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.
Charles Bukowski
One's task is not to turn the world upside down but to do what is necessary at the given place and with a due consideration of reality.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity.
Erich Fromm
Almost all genius up to now was one-sided—the result of a sickly constitution. One type had too much sense of the external, the other too much inner sense. Seldom could nature achieve a balance between the two—a complete constitution of genius. Often a perfect proportion arose by chance, but this could never endure because it was not comprehended and fixed by the spirit—they remained fortunate moments. The first genius that penetrated itself found here the exemplary germ of an immeasurable world. It made a discovery which must have been the most remarkable in the history of the world—for with it there begins a whole new epoch for humanity—and true history of all kinds becomes possible for the first time at this stage—for the way that had been traversed hitherto now makes up a proper whole that can be entirely elucidated. That point outside the world is given, and now Archimedes can fulfill his promise.
Novalis
Belief means not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I never work better than when I am inspired by anger for when I am angry I can write pray and preach well for then my whole temperament is quickened my understanding sharpened and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.
Martin Luther
The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Spirituality wants to know and experience higher states of mind and being. It wants to wrestle with angels and look the Creator in the eye.
Stefan Emunds
I care for you, darling, I love you,the only reason I fucked L. is because you fuckedZ. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N.and because you fucked N. I had to fuckY. But I think of you constantly, I feel youhere in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it,no matter what happens I'd call it love, and soyou fucked C. and then before I could moveyou fucked W., so I had to fuck D. ButI want you to know that I love you, I think of youconstantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybodylike I love you.
Charles Bukowski
The Christian must treat his enemy as a brother, and requite his hostility with love. His behavior must be determined not by the way others treat him, but by the treatment he himself receives from Jesus; it has only one source, and that is the will of Jesus.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In the book Soldiers on the Home Front, I was greatly struck by the fact that in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. An what's her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she's disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, hear beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together.
Anne Frank
He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.
Hermann Hesse
Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
When virtue has slept she will get up more refreshed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
and beware those whoonly takeinstructions from theirGodfor they havefailed completely to live their ownlives.
Charles Bukowski
Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted--but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Just like a flower, you are a creation of unique beauty from the one essence of life.
Sharon Kirstin
Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings—as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.
Cornelia Funke
We will be victorious if we have not forgotten how to learn.
Rosa Luxemburg
Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr gethan, ihn zu überwinden? Was ist der Affe für en Menschen? Ein Gelächter oder eine schmerzliche Scham. Und ebendas soll der Mensch für den Übermenschen sein: ein Gelächter oder eine schmerzliche Scham. Ihr habt den Weg vom Wurme zum Menschen gemacht, und Vieles ist in euch noch Wurm. Einst wart ihr Affen, und auch jetzt ist der Mensch mehr Affe, als irgend ein Affe.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.
Albert Einstein
It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach
...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
Max Weber
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Hermann Hesse
...for you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than force." Vesadeva to Siddartha
Hermann Hesse