Quotes by German Authors - Page 39

The iPod completely changed the way people approach music.
Karl Lagerfeld
A man does not have to be an angel to be a saint.
Albert Schweitzer
When we come under the spell of the deeper domain of technology, its economic character and even its power aspect fascinate us less than its playful side. Then we realize we that we are involved in a play, a dance of the spirit, which cannot be grasped by calculation. What is ultimately left for science is intuition alone - a call of destiny.This playful feature manifests itself more clearly in small things than in the gigantic works of our world. The crude observer can only be impressed by large quantities - chiefly when they are in motion - and yet there are as many organs in a fly as in a leviathan.
Ernst Jünger
The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man.
Erich Fromm
With stillness comes the benediction of Peace.
Eckhart Tolle
Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness or else forgiving another.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
there is a place in the heart thatwill never be filleda spaceand even during thebest momentsandthe greatest timestimeswe will know itwe will know itmore thaneverthere is a place in the heart thatwill never be filledandwe will waitandwaitin that space.
Charles Bukowski
The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
Albert Einstein
Can Christian preaching expect modern man to accept the mythical view of the world as true? To do so would be both senseless and impossible. It would be senseless, because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age.
Rudolf Karl Bultmann
We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Albert Einstein
To me bathtubs are the epitome of luxury. Either you have no money to own one or you have no time to use one.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
No I don't understand my husband's theory of relativity but I know my husband and I know he can be trusted.
Elsa Einstein
I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.
Herta Müller
Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
At the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done.
Thomas à Kempis
I felt I had to win. It seemed very important. I didn't know why it was important and I kept thinking, why do I think this is so important? And another part of me answered, just because it is.
Charles Bukowski
I love you like the devil loves his pitchfork. I love you like the angel loves his wings. I love you from here to heaven, through hell and back again.
Robert Thier
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm
Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.
Hermann Hesse
There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is difficult transient is her reward.
Friedrich von Schiller
The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.
Thomas Mann
The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.
Karl Dönitz
And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.
Hermann Hesse
well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you
Charles Bukowski
He who reflects too much will achieve little.
J. C. F. von Schiller
The greatest thing about writing is that you get to shape more than one life.
Katja Michael
None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.
Max Horkheimer
All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.
Albert Einstein
Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden.. forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.
Hermann Hesse
Unfortunately robots capable of manufacturing robots do not exist. That would be the philosopher's stone, the squaring of the circle.
Ernst Jünger
I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.
Otto von Bismarck
Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.
Ernst Haeckel
The unnatural - that too is natural.
Goethe
If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.
Friedrich Schiller
War is like love it always finds a way.
Bertolt Brecht
The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as the elementary quantum of action is to the Quantum Theory: it is its absolute core.
Max Planck
What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.
Eckhart Tolle
How can anyone truthfully claim to love someone when they’re not prepared to share everything with that person, including their past?
Jan-Philipp Sendker
Politics is the only field in which the character of a person does not stand in the way of his career.
Peter Prange
No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Love cannot live where there is no trust.
Edith Hamilton
I do not think we have a "right" to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks.
Marlene Dietrich
I kept telling myself that all the women in the world weren´t whores, just mine.
Charles Bukowski
For every God there is a Satan, and because God made all of us godly, there is a Satan in us all.
Felix O. Hartmann
Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself.
Theodor W. Adorno
I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.
Hermann Hesse
Many are less fortunate than you’ may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
To talk about the senselessness of the battle was to attribute sense to war itself.
Sten Nadolny
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
Martin Heidegger
But dogmatism--or the inclination 'to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking'--is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing "Ame," Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. J. Benda, I, 19]
Leo Strauss
I let you discover my skin but you found a way under.
Katja Michael
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened... Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be... We are apparently on the trail here of some sort of invisible or hidden hand that beneficially hides difficulties from us.
Albert O. Hirschman
During this time I came to understand a lot about myself, human beings, faith and the meaning of marriage and friendship. The world is not black and white, nothing is what it seems, and we are not cartoon characters that can be divided into goodies and baddies, but complex and multi-faceted beings with many weaknesses. Human beings will always disappoint. But God is there. He sometimes speaks through others and we would be wise to listen to those we trust and to our own inner voice, God’s voice. No matter how difficult or painful life sometimes becomes, we must never lose faith.We may not always find justice in this world, but compassion and forgiveness are such important qualities. They help us to dissolve so much of the negativity that we hold. Practising them mostly benefits ourselves.
Kristiane Backer
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5
Erich Maria Remarque