Quotes by German Authors - Page 52

In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.
Walter Moers
Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live.
Eckhart Tolle
The best remedy for those who are afraid lonely or unhappy is to go outside somewhere where they can be quiet alone with the heavens nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists and it certainly always will I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
Anne Frank
The "supreme good" and its attainment -- that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.
Josef Pieper
Worry has never solved a problem.
Stefan Emunds
The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.
Erich Fromm
Whoever tells a lie is not pure of heart, and such a person can not cook a clean soup.
Ludwig van Beethoven
It's better to dance like a fool, than to stand around like an idiot.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Among many other things, genius implies the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple, and to recognize inclusive structural principals.
C.W. Ceram
The practice of medicine is a thinker's art the practice of surgery a plumber's.
Martin H. Fisher
...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
He has been waiting for us, waiting in vain, and His fatherly heart was filled with grief. When He then sought to call us home through chastenings, we rebelled against Him and His actions and again refused to come home to the Father. What else should He do with us?
M. Basilea Schlink
...for she too is spending time in her life only in order to be alive.
Erpenbeck Jennie Visitation
It is not your love that sustains the marriage,but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff" (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed.
Albert Einstein
What knows he of love who has not been obliged to despise just what he loved
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things.
Ernst Cassirer
Fashion is about two things: the evolution and the opposite.
Karl Lagerfeld
In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.
Jacob Grimm
The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces the chief points in the process of history.
Edward Bernstein
True communication is communion- the realization of oneness, which is love.
Eckhart Tolle
Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong again and again - the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer.... Darwin forgot the mind (- that in English): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind one must need mind - one loses it when one no longer needs it. He who possesses strength divests himself of mind.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.
Oliver Markus
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Walter Benjamin
When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently.
Eckhart Tolle
The obedience of Christ was far more acceptable to God, than the innocence of Adam; so that a thousand such as Adam could not have equalled Christ alone. For however he, had he continued in the state of innocence, would have left us an hereditary righteousness, of which we should have been possessed: notwithstanding, unspeakably greater, and more excellent, is our union with God in Christ, since he being made man, hath so purified and exalted the human nature in himself, that the primitive state of Adam is not once to be compared with it.
Johann Arndt
I am my own heaven and hell!
J. C. F. von Schiller
In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.
Karl Marx
We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.
Erich Maria Remarque
...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.
Hermann Hesse
... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.
Josef Pieper
If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves.
E.T.A. Hoffmann
We’ve each given the hours of our lives in dull rote jobs for other men’s profit, and have been asked to be grateful for doing that.
Charles Bukowski
I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.
Hermann Hesse
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
Hannah Arendt
the world is better withoutthem.only the plants and the animals aretrue comrades.I drink to them and withthem.
Charles Bukowski
Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs I would enter.
Martin Luther
If you want to know your true opinion of someone watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and say: Guess what I've got in my fist; then Detering, a peasant, who thinks of nothing but his farm-yard and his wife; and finally Stanislaus Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs.
Erich Maria Remarque
A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.
Erich Maria Remarque
The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file
Ernst Jünger
And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
Charles Bukowski
I understand you well. Now we have no need to dispute: you are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, the difference between men akin to their father and those who take their destiny from a woman; the difference between spirit and intellect.
Hermann Hesse
He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.
Hermann Hesse
On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.
Theodor W. Adorno
I'm only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words-- I can't do that. That's a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, 'An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician-- but a magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.
Cornelia Funke
No, you don't shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that's what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.
Katja Michael
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.
Rosa Luxemburg
The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Women are mysterious beings in which lie strange delights.
Stefan Emunds
Why do we fear the dark as unavoidable defeat when it alone is constant, and we'd starve if it stopped watering the lawn of dreams.
Rosmarie Waldrop
Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Each of us is under a divinely spoken obligation to reach out with pardon and mercy and to forgive one another. There is a great need for this Christlike attribute in our families, in our marriages, in our wards and stakes, in our communities, and in our nations. We will receive the joy of forgiveness in our own lives when we are willing to extend that joy freely to others. Lip service is not enough. We need to purge our hearts and minds of feelings and thoughts of bitterness and let the light and the love of Christ enter in. As a result, the Spirit of the Lord will fill our souls with the joy accompanying divine peace of conscience.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. "Temple" means... that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or habitation... Similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days... and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends.
Josef Pieper
The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.
Geoffrey Hartman
The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited.
Charles Bukowski