Quotes by German Authors - Page 49

Friendship is like a flower. It needs daily love and care to blossom. If you forget to give it water, the flower dies. It’s as simple as that! Teddy
Lily Amis
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Karl Marx
The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us
Charles Bukowski
The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights.
Hannah Arendt
The self is the class (not the collection) of the experiences (or autopsychological states). The self does not belong to the expression of the basic experience, but is constructed only on a very high level.
Rudolf Carnap
The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The happiest people are not the ones with the best or the most things, but those who most appreciate what they have.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
Johann von Goethe
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.
W.G. Sebald
hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces.
Pope Benedict XVI
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
Thomas Mann
Once he said to her: 'You are like me; you are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else, and within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it.
Hermann Hesse
On horseback you feel as if you're moving in time to classical music a camel seems to progress to the beat of a drum played by a drunk.
Walter Moers
Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their help he was always getting to know new people, many of whom even became his friends.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
Life is like riding a ship into the storm. For every wave you take up, you have to drop just as deep.
Felix O. Hartmann
Standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.
Heisenberg
Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
Erich Maria Remarque
In general, those who resort to mass murder on a collective scale always put forward the justification that they acted on behalf of the nation.
Taner Akçam
One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!
Friedrich Nietzsche
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The state was made for man, not man for state.
Albert Einstein
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice.
Albert Einstein
This change did not bring me into the community of the others, did not make me closer to anyone, but actually made me even lonelier. My reformation seemed to point in the direction ofDemian, but even this was a distant fate. I did not know myself, for I was too deeply involved. It had begunwith Beatrice, but for some time I had been living in such an unreal world with my paintings and my thoughtsof Demian that I'd forgotten all about her, too. I could not have uttered a single word about my dreams andexpectations, my inner change, to anyone, not even if I had wanted to. But how could I have wanted to?
Hermann Hesse
On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
Thomas Mann
Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.
Christof Koch
I would like to repeat that I do not fancy myself as anything special for being an anarch. My emotions are no different from those of the average man. Perhaps I have pondered this relationship a bit more carefully and am conscious of a freedom to which “basically” everybody is entitled – a freedom that more or less dicates his actions.
Ernst Jünger
I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
Hermann Hesse
Reading makes you impudent. Oh yes, unknown father, so it does.
Nina George
Nature in her creative dreaming, dreamt the same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imitation, then certainly it had to be reciprocal. Should one take the children of the soil as models because they possessed the depth of organic reality, whereas the ice flowers were mere external phenomena? But as phenomena, they were the result of an interplay of matter no less complex than that found in plants. If I understood our friendly host correctly, what concerned him was the unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, the idea that we sin against the latter if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous, since there is no elementary capability that is reserved exclusively for living creatures or that the biologist could not likewise study on inanimate models.
Thomas Mann
[Paul] has no intention to instruct the Christian community about the task and responsibility of government. His entire concern is with the responsibility of the Christian community towards the State.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself - ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.
Thomas Mann
The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not far in the future when a sufficient collection of facts will permit determination of the internal architecture of molecules. A series of experiments directed toward such a goal is the object of this paper.
Wilhelm Körner
Life's objective is life itself.
Johann von Goethe
(by the way . . . I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don't like it . . . ram a nipple up your scrotum. -printer: leave this in.)
Charles Bukowski
If a man is called to be a streetsweep-er he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
Martin Luther King
In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.
Ernst Jentsch
To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult of all.
Johann von Goethe
It is in the half fools and the half wise that the greatest danger lies.
Goethe
Energy will do anything that can be done in this world.
Johann von Goethe
In Mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.
Georg Cantor
We can redeem anyone who strives unceasingly.
Goethe
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, great wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
Anne Frank
Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.
Karl Lagerfeld
God hath thus ordered it, that we may learn to bear one another’s burdens; for no man is without fault, no man without his burden, no man sufficient of himself, no man wise enough of himself; but we ought to bear with one another, comfort one another, help, instruct, and admonish one another.
Thomas à Kempis
One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.
Thomas Mann
I praise loudly I blame softly.
Catherine II
I write poetry, worry, smile,laughsleepcontinue for a whilejust like most of usjust like all of us;sometimes I want to hug allMankind on earthand say,god damn all this that they've brought down on us,we are brave and goodeven though we are selfishand kill each other andkill ourselves,we are the peopleborn to kill and die and weep in dark roomsand love in dark rooms,and wait, andwait and wait and wait.we are the people.we are nothingmore.
Charles Bukowski
There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The fewer the words the better the prayer.
Martin Luther
Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.
Albert Einstein
A sure way of retaining the grace of heaven is to disregard outward appearances, and diligently to cultivate such things as foster amendment of life and fervour of soul, rather than to cultivate those qualities that seem most popular.
Thomas à Kempis
Love should not be polluted with friendship.
Erich Maria Remarque
Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.
Johann Gottfried Herder
It is thy duty oftentimes to do what thou wouldst not thy duty too to leave undone that thou wouldst do.
Thomas à Kempis
What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us - assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.
Peter Sloterdijk
God cares only for what is his, busies himself with only himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes...He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is--A purely egoistic cause.
Max Stirner