Quotes by German Authors - Page 74

This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.
Kurt Schwitters
The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Trees live in symbiosis with hyphae (fungus/mold roots). A tea spoon of dirt contains kilometers of these roots. One species can spread throughout entire forests over centuries. They exchange nutrients with trees, along with information about insects, drought and other dangers. It's like a 'wood wide web'.
Peter Wohlleben
A promise to love someone forever, then, means, 'As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.' Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one's fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.
Niklas Luhmann
What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?
Bertolt Brecht
And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.
Charles Bukowski
The earth is large and old enough to teach us modesty.
Hans Cloos
Music gives color to the air of the moment.
Karl Lagerfeld
We ought to face our destiny with courage.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value.
Johann von Goethe
If somebody tells you a rule, break it. That's the only thing to move things forward.
Hans Zimmer
No permanence is ours; we are a waveThat flows to fit whatever form it finds:Through day or night, cathedral or caveWe pass forever, craving form that binds.
Hermann Hesse
Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are by their very nature highly uncertain precarious ephemeral and subject to chance.
Arthur Schopenhauer
By means of industry and perseverance you will rise higher and higher.
Robert Schumann
The more you make your thoughts and beliefs into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.
Eckhart Tolle
as the shadows assumeshapesI fight the slowretreatnowmy once-promisedwindlingdwindlingnowlighting new cigarettespouring moredrinksit has been a beautifulfightstillis.
Charles Bukowski
…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work. 'The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared' (Luther).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
Albert Einstein
The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself.
Karl Marx
Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.
Hermann Hesse
So I asked Dr Ceric if he thought there was a conflict between European values and Islam. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Respect for other religions lies at the heart of Islam. And the principle of democracy is even anchored in Islam.’ When I looked surprised he explained: ‘Go right back to the origins of Islam.After Muhammad died, how did his followers seek his successor? They consulted with each other and chose his closest friend Abu Bakr in a democratic vote. Democracy is absolutely Islamic.
Kristiane Backer
History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
Karl Marx
And I did work out something: that the rich of the earth indeed create misery, but they cannot bear to see it. They are weaklings and fools just like you. As long as they have enough to eat and can grease their floors with butter so that even the crumbs that fall from your table grow fat, they can't look with indifference on a man collapsing from hunger - although, of course, it must be in front of their house that he collapses.
Bertolt Brecht
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Arnold Harberger, Milton Friedman & Co. Inc., your modest proposal of partial equilibrium for the general good is not without its own internal contradictions. Moreover, you cannot take complete credit for this program of equilibriation. Although you and your colleagues and disciples at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago may have dedicated two decades to the design of the program and the technical training of its executors, it took the approach of another major economic and political crisis of capitalism, analogous to that of the 1930's, to mobilize the political support and the military force to instal a government prepared to put your program of equilibration and your equilibrating experts to work in Chile - and you, Milton Friedman, are still waiting to put your part of the same program, complete with Brazilian style indexing, into practice at home for the glory and benefit of the bourgeoisie in the USA, whom you so faithfully serve as paid executors and executioners.
André Gunder Frank
Animal welfare - yes. Animal rights - don't make me laugh. I'm not an animals rights activist. I certainly do not love animals. In fact, I secretly mistrust all four-legged / furry / two-winged / feathered / shelled ar scaly brothers and sisters. If I were them, I would by now be plotting ultimate revenge on a scale previously unknown to man. ... I stick to a vegan diet only for reasons of self-preservertion. Call it insurance. When the time of the great animal uprising comes, I may have a small chance of escaping ...
Sharon Dodua Otoo
It's nice to see how the suffering goes away in time. It always does
Kathrin Schmidt
That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation... Will replaces vision; temporality of the act outsts the eternity of the "good-in-itself"As the product of the indifferent, his being, too, must be indifferent. Then the facing of his morality would simply warrant the reaction "let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." There is no point in caring for what has no sanction behind it in any creative intention.
Hans Jonas
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
Erich Fromm
In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.
Rudiger Dornbusch
Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says ‘All for me’ is a horror to us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My Ego taught me a new pride, I teach it to men: No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth!
Friedrich Nietzsche
[a] characteristic of a symbol is that it opens up levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us.[a symbol] also unlocks dimensions and elements of our soul which correspond to the dimensions and elements of reality. A great play gives us not only a new vision of the human scene, but it opens up hidden depths of our own being.
Paul Tillich
Happiness,... even the smallest happiness, is like a step out of Time, and the greatest happiness is sharing in Eternity.
Josef Pieper
It is certain that there can be no work in political economy on any other than an altruistic basis... If our work is to retain any meaning it can only be informed by this: concern for the future, for those who will come after us.
Max Weber
I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;--then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees. The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth.
Erich Maria Remarque
Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is not hard work that is dreary it is superficial work
Edith Hamilton
Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.
Charles Bukowski
No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandment of Jesus. Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? ... How can you hope to enter into communion with him when at some point in your life you are running away from him?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Marx hated weakness in men, and considered the making of moral judgements as the last resort of the weak. To say 'That is morally wrong' is implicitly to say ' I am powerless to stop that, so I will inveigh against it'.
Paul Robert Wolff
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible... Contemplation does not ignore the "historical Gethsemane," does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow.
Josef Pieper
Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Finally, my watchers had to fess up. In embarrassed and genuinely polite tones, they said they had no other choice but to arrest me. Then they accompanied me to the prison across the way. As I entered, an extremely tall SS man leapt in front of me and asked: “Do you have any weapons?” “Why?” I responded. “Do I need any?
Rudolph Herzog
Life is too short to waste your time with bad books.
Michael Krüger
to have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
Thomas Mann
What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.
Thomas Mann
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Friedrich Nietzsche
politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
Oscar Ameringer
This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Relationships based on dishonesty, lies,Secrets and cheats R not only predictedto fail but also a waste of precious timeand energie! U can’t fool yourself 4ever!
Lily Amis
Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.
Novalis