Quotes by German Authors - Page 48

Most people go on living their everyday life: frightened half indifferent they behold the ghostly tragi-comedy that has been performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world.
Albert Einstein
Those who are weak don't fight.Those who are stronger might fightfor an hour.Those who are stronger still might fightfor many years.The strongest fighttheir whole life.They are the indispensable ones.
Bertolt Brecht
Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
I'm not dead yet, just in a state of rapid decay, who isn't?
Charles Bukowski
Tenderness is greater proof of love than the most passionate of vows.
Marlene Dietrich
The notion that the fulfilment of prayer has been determined from eternity, that it was originally included in the plan of creation, is the empty, absurd fiction of a mechanical mode of thought, which is in absolute contradiction with the nature of religion. Whether God decides on the fulfilment of my prayer now, on the immediate occasion of my offering it, or whether he did decide on it long ago, is the same thing.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.
Albert Schweitzer
Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.
Novalis
Yes?’ he asked, looking at me over the sheet.‘I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.’‘Oh, a writer, eh?’‘Yes.’‘Are you sure?’‘No, I’m not.’‘What do you write?’‘Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.’‘A novel, eh?’‘Yes.’‘What’s the name of it?’‘”The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.”‘‘Oh, I like that. What’s it about?’‘Everything.’‘Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?’‘Yes.’‘How about my wife?’‘She’s in there too.
Charles Bukowski
The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.
Hermann Hesse
It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect — a process which occurs in every dialectical victory — you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage. — Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as “Death before dishonour,” and so on.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Principles are only tools in the hands of God they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Of course I am not referring to those outburts of passions that drive us to do and say things we will later regret, that delude us into thinking we cannot life without a certain person, that set us quivering with anxiety at the mere possibility we might ever lose that person-a feeling that impoverishes rather than enriches us because we long to possess what we cannot, to hold on what we cannot.No. I speak of a love that brings sight to the blind. Of a love stronger than fear. I speak of a love that breathes meaning into life, that defies the natural laws of deterioration, that causes us to flourish, that knows no bounds. I speak of the triumph of the human spirit over selfishness and death.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at bottom comes up."―Epigrams and Interludes, Section 79
Friedrich Nietzsche
To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.
Ernst F. Schumacher
Spirit? Who is that fellow? And where do you know him from? Is he perhaps not merely an arbitrary and convenient hypostasis that you have not even defined, let alone deduced or proved? Do you think you have an audience of old women in front of you?
Arthur Schopenhauer
Everyone wants to rule the world . . . Really, absolutely everyone. That's what it's all about, isn't it? That's what it's always about in the end. And every species believes it's number one. Every individual is firmly convinced that he or she alone has the right to ascend to the throne and issue orders to get rid of others. And in reality everyone is fooling themselves, because up there on the throne it's lonely and cold.
Akif Pirinçci
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.
Novalis
We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A respectable appearance is sufficient to make people more interested in your soul
Karl Lagerfeld
Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.
Arthur Schopenhauer
For it cannot be denied that all over the world and in all ages there are beings who are perceived to be extraordinary, charming, and appealing, and whom many honor as benevolent spirits, because they make one think of a more beautiful, a freer, a more winged life than the one we lead.
Hermann Hesse
When a hundred men stand together each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.
Peter Sloterdijk
Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac treeFrom which a small wood-owl calls.
Johannes Bobrowski
Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The declining of responsibility for the self can also be hidden behind a pseudo-objectivity. A patient may make astute observations about himself and give a fairly accurate report of what he dislikes in himself. On the surface it seems as though he is perceptive and honest about himself. But "he" may be merely the intelligent observer of a fellow who is inhibited, fearful, or arrogantly demanding. Hence, since he is not responsible for the fellow he observes, the hurt to his pride is cushioned—all the moreso because the flashlight of his pride is focused on his faculty for keen observations.
Karen Horney
The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.
Alexander von Humboldt
a life can change in a tenth ofa second.or sometimes it can take70years.
Charles Bukowski
The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.
Friedrich Nietzsche
However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.
W.G. Sebald
Relate to a life situation in the deepest sense: not from the standpoint of the ego that bemoans its fate and rebels against it, but from... the greater inner law that has left behind its small birth, the narrow realm of personal outlook, for the sake of renewal and rebirth.
Max Zeller
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that viciousness!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Your heart doesn’t like shady strategies.
Stefan Emunds
There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There had been a quarrel, she had been hurt, had wept. Now it was over; now she sat still and waited. Life would go on. As with children. As with animals. If only you did not talk, did not make simple things complicated, did not turn your soul inside out.
Hermann Hesse
Parsifal is on his way to the temple of the Grail Knights and says: “I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come”, and the all-knowing Gurnemanz replies: “You see, my son, time turns here into space
Richard Wagner
Only those who are alive can bring life to others. The spiritually dead are unable to generate life, because there is no life in them. They cannot be a testimony to others by their deeds. They are simply dead. Whoever does not live in repentance belongs to the spiritually dead, who cannot bring anyone to life. But the penitent are full of life, divine life; and they can bring others to life. Whenever someone repents, he scarcely needs to say a word. He doesn't need to preach at others. Rather, when he lies prostrate before God and man and confesses with a broken and contrite heart, "I have sinned; I am guilty," his words have the power of life. They can open the hardest hearts and bring to life the spiritually dead.
M. Basilea Schlink
Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What was this yearning, tearing at her insides like hunger and thirst? It couldn't be love. Love was warm and soft, like a bed of leaves. But this was dark, like the shade under a poisonous shrub, and it was hungry. So hungry. It must have some other name, just as there couldn't be the same word for life and death, or for moon and sun
Cornelia Funke
Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out?
Eckhart Tolle
Talent is only cream in your coffee. There is no reason to rest on your talent. If you don't present it, then it gets nowhere.
Mies Van Der Rohe
Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder.
Eberhard Arnold
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.
Erich Maria Remarque
But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.
Jürgen Habermas
We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.
Hermann Hesse
The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?
Bernhard Schlink
How can we expect fate to let a righteous cause prevail when there is hardly anyone who will give himself up undividedly to a righteous cause?
Sophie Scholl
Faith can be interested in results only, for a truth once recognized as such puts an end to the believer's thinking.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears from the eyes of woman.
Beethoven
Money is really worth no more than as it can be used to accomplish the Lord's work. Life is worth as much as it is spent for the Lord's service.
George Müller
...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.
Saša Stanišić
What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!
Friedrich Nietzsche
One thing I know the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer
Examine the lives of the best and more fruitful men and peoples, and ask yourselves whether a tree, if it is to grow proudly into the sky, can do without bad weather and storms: whether unkindness and opposition from without, whether some sort of hatred, envy, obstinacy, mistrust, severity, greed and violence do not belong to the favouring circumstances without which a great increase even in virtue is hardly possible. The poison which destroys the weaker nature strengthens the stronger – and he does not call it poison, either.
Friedrich Nietzsche