Quotes by German Authors - Page 71

Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me --and boredom is the coldest thing in the world.
Thomas Mann
The only people who attain power are those who crave for it.
Erich Kästner
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
Eckhart Tolle
Modern poets mix too much water with their ink.
Goethe
The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.
Karl Rahner
How simple our Lord's word is, Love thy neighbor. Just think how that word has been twisted around, just because it's hard to love thy neighbor.
Edgar Maass
Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.
Albert Einstein
Pronto me di cuenta de que estas enseñanzas podían ser un consuelo sólo para los que las aceptaran literalmente y que creyeran ser la verdad. Si fueran, como para mí, en parte bella literatura, parte símbolos intrincados; un intento de explicación mitológica del mundo, uno podría instruirse y apreciarlas, pero uno no aprendería la forma de vivir y sacar fuerza de ellas.
Hermann Hesse
Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.
Thomas Mann
What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of though, true or false, is motivated by the subjective needs and interests of the person who is thinking. It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it.
Erich Fromm
You expect me to come and work for you dressed up as a man?” I gasped.
Robert Thier
It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.
Max Planck
Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.
Martin Heidegger
All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.
Eckhart Tolle
It is difficult to move on when your surroundings stay the same.
Katja Michael
Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.
Ernst Pawel
We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.
Johann Baptist Metz
when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric”I know what hemeantI know what hewanted:to be completely alive every momentin spite of the inevitable.we can’t cheat death but we can make itwork so hardthat when it does takeusit will have known a victory just asperfect asours
Charles Bukowski
The author determines that the bitterest struggles are for one side of the truth to the suppression of the other side.
Edith Hamilton
The 'commandment' of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be 'commanded' because it has first been given.
Pope Benedict XVI
Books like Twilight are not art. They are mass-produced crap that is meant to be consumed by the widest possible audience, for the largest possible profit.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party – though they are quite numerous – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice, but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.
Rosa Luxemburg
To understand pretending is to conquer all barriers of time and space.
William Joyce
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
Theodor W. Adorno
Gracious Providence, to whom I owe all my powers, why didst thou not withhold some of those blessings I possess, and substitute in their place a feeling of self-confidence and contentment?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The true artist is not proud, he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun. I would, perhaps, rather come to you and your people, than to many rich folk who display inward poverty.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Wherever you go, there you are.
Thomas à Kempis
God is an unutterable sigh planted in the depths of the soul.
Jean Paul Richter
I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.
Charles Bukowski
Of the spirit of women. - The spiritual power of a woman is best demonstrated by her sacrificing her own spirit to that of a man out of love of him and of his spirit but then, despite this sacrifice, immediately evolving _a new spirit_ within the new domain, originally alien to her nature, to which the man's disposition impels her. (from Assorted Opinions & Maxims 272)-- This is the first time among years of reading Nietzsche that i agree with his words on women: this aphorism captures a few quintessences of true and gallant womanhood, namely the will(ingness) to sacrifice (not only to others but also to the necessity that arises in a context), the balance between creative and reactive, the free-spiritedness out of such balance without conceit and swagger, and the malleability/fluidity without blind submission. (It is momentous to note that the man-woman dynamic is not binary, and that man/womanhood is not a given in one's biology - it's more something that evolves in a person over time.)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Although it is very easy to marry a wife, it is very difficult to support her along with the children and the household. Accordingly, no one notices this faith of Jacob. Indeed, many hate fertility in a wife for the sole reason that the offspring must be supported and brought up. For this is what they commonly say: ‘Why should I marry a wife when I am a pauper and a beggar? I would rather bear the burden of poverty alone and not load myself with misery and want.’ But this blame is unjustly fastened on marriage and fruitfulness. Indeed, you are indicting your unbelief by distrusting God’s goodness, and you are bringing greater misery upon yourself by disparaging God’s blessing. For if you had trust in God’s grace and promises, you would undoubtedly be supported. But because you do not hope in the Lord, you will never prosper.
Martin Luther
Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.
Charles Bukowski
What is your advice to young writers?""Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.""What is your advice to older writers?""If you're still alive, you don't need any advice.""What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?""What makes you take a shit?
Charles Bukowski
Hauriou, became a crown witness for us when he confirmed this connection in 1916, in the midst of WWI: “The revolution of 1789 had no other goal than absolute access to the writing of legal statutes and the systematic destruction of customary institutions. It resulted in a state of permanent revolution because the mobility of the writing of laws did not provide for the stability of certain customary institutions, because the forces of change were stronger than the forces of stability. Social and political life in France was completely emptied of institutions and was only able to provisionally maintain itself by sudden jolts spurred by the heightened morality.
Carl Schmitt
Rise up and become the person you were meant to be.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Movement is the essence of life.
Bernd Heinrich
The future belongs to us. I think that art is a force that can change the world.
Shahin Najafi
The power of such a mountain is so great and yet so subtle that, without compulsion, people are drawn to it from near and far, as if by the force of some invisible magnet…this worshipful or religious attitude is not impressed by scientific facts, like figures of altitude, which are foremost in the mind of modern man. Nor is it motivated by the urge to ‘conquer’ the mountain.
Anagarika Govinda
Freedom may never be conceived merely negatively, as the absence of compulsion. Freedom conceived intersubjectively distinguishes itself from the arbitrary freedom of the isolated individual. No one is free until we are all free.
Jürgen Habermas
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann
God's love for his people is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.
Pope Benedict XVI
Forgiveness is God's command.
Martin Luther
What you react to in another you strengthen within yourself.
Eckhart Tolle
Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.
Karl Lagerfeld
Then, too, I am constantly confronted by students, some of whom have already rejected all ways but the scientific to come to know the world, and who seek only a deeper, more dogmatic indoctrination in that faith (although the world is no longer in their vocabulary). Other students suspect that not even the entire collection of machines and instruments at MIT can significantly give meaning to their lives. They sense the presence of a dilemma in an education polarized around science and technology, an education that implicitly claims to open a privileges access-path to fact, but that cannot tell them how to decide what to count as fact. Even while they recognize the genuine importance of learning their craft, they rebel at working on projects that appear to address themselves neither to answering interesting questions of fact nor to solving problems in theory.
Joseph Weizenbaum
The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; but to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies.
Albert Schweitzer
An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.
Werner Heisenberg
The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.
Cornelia Funke
This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.
Oswald Spengler
The old gal was only another lonely creature in a world that didn’t care
Charles Bukowski
Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.
Werner Herzog
Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection not in books alone but in every leaf of springtime.
Martin Luther
When we find money in the street, we happily pick it up, even if it’s just a buck, but when we bump into love, we tend to be so picky.
Stefan Emunds