Quotes by German Authors - Page 77

There is no reality except the one contained within us.
Hermann Hesse
Anything that is not necessary to the painting damages it." Henri Matisse
Volkmar Essers
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
Hermann Hesse
I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope self.
Martin Luther
The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ... Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.
Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp
Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
For true conversion doth not consist in putting away great and outward sins only, but in descending deeply into your own self, searching into the inmost recesses of the heart, the secrets and closets, all the windings and turnings thereof; changing and renewing them throughout, with the grace that is given you: and so, by faith, you are converted from self-love to Divine love; from the world and all worldly concupiscences, to a spiritual and heavenly life; and from a participation of the pomps and pleasures thereof, to participating the merits and virtues of Christ, by believing his word, and walking in his steps.
Johann Arndt
I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.
Hermann Hesse
Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism
Max Scheler
The desire we so often hear expressed today for “episcopal figures,” “priestly men,” “authoritative personalities” springs frequently enough from a spiritually sick need for the admiration of men, for the establishment of visible human authority, because the genuine authority of service appears to be so unimpressive.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
Erich Fromm
A determined will, grounded on a clear order of rank of values, coupled with organic strength of outlook, will also one day - despite all hindrances - enforce its realisation in all domains.
Alfred Rosenberg
Believe in yourself, your dreams, wishes, desires and goals, even if others don’t.
Lily Amis
What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming.
Eckhart Tolle
-Nobody can force you to smile, she says. -What? I ask. But I know she's not even talking to me, only to herself, as if she's the last person left in the room. -They can make you show your teeth, but what good is that? Nobody can make you smile against your will.
Hugo Hamilton
The blessing hands of Christ are like a roof that protects us. But at the same time, they are a gesture of opening up, tearing the world open so that heaven my enter in, may become "present" within it.
Pope Benedict XVI
Laying up treasures in heaven will draw the heart heavenward.
George Müller
Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.
Erwin Panofsky
He tried to think of death as he had done now and then, but that tired him and he dozed off. When he awoke an hour later, he felt fresh and calm as though he had slept for days.
Hermann Hesse
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged
Heinrich Heine
Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.
Josef Pieper
The best or nothing at all.
Gottlieb Daimler
The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.
Jean Paul
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.
Albert Einstein
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man
Arthur Schopenhauer
Never again!" commanded his will. "Again! Tomorrow!" begged his heart.
Hermann Hesse
You are all made of real poop.
Anne Frank
If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut
Albert Einstein
In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.
Albert Einstein
The greatest and most blessed thing in the Germanic life is the mythical, sensitive, yet strong, awakening. The fact is that we have again begun to dream our own primal dreams.
Alfred Rosenberg
When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you're doing, you become stressed.
Eckhart Tolle
In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.
Rupertus Meldenius
I'm looking for what I was capable of before... Or to be more precise, I'm trying to see whether I'm still capable of it.
Nina George
The will of man is his happiness.
J. C. F. von Schiller
what you werewill not happen again.the tigers have found meand I do not care.
Charles Bukowski
The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.
Thomas Mann
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
Albert Einstein
I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
W.G. Sebald
Opposition inflames the enthusiast never converts him.
J. C. F. von Schiller
If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something I can neither give nor receive.
Dorothy Solle
I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done 'for the Fatherland'.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If you want to be proud of yourself, then do things in which you can take pride
Karen Horney
Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature - and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine - fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the advantage even in determining the goal, since this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while, conversely,it is hard to determine when the negative aim of the destruction of a hostile doctrine may be regarded as achieved and assured. For this reason alone, the philosophy's offensive will be more systematic and also more powerful than the defensive against a philosophy, since here, too, as always, the attack and not the defence makes the decision. The fight against a spiritual power with methods of violence remains defensive, however, until the sword becomes the support,the herald and disseminator, of a new spiritual doctrine.
Adolf Hitler
I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it. Likewise, I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in.
Ernst Jünger
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.
Karl Marx
The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If the Baron meets with a parcel of negro ships carrying whites into slavery to work upon their plantations in a cold climate, should we therefore imagine that he intends a reflection on the present traffic in human flesh? And that, if the negroes should do so, it would be simple justice, as retaliation is the law of God! If we were to think this a reflection on any present commercial or political matter, we should be tempted to imagine, perhaps, some political ideas conveyed in every page, in every sentence of the whole. Whether such things are or are not the intentions of the Baron the reader must judge.
Rudolf Erich Raspe
A beautiful woman can have almost any man she wants. A rich man can have almost any woman he wants.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value."This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case "I do not want to deceive myself" is subsumed under the generalization "I do not want to deceive." But why not deceive?But why not allow oneself to be deceived?Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting?
Friedrich Nietzsche
No sheep may leave the flock," he said to anyone who would listen, "unless he comes back again.
Leonie Swann
Very often inertia, selfishness, and vanity play the greatest role in our trust in others; inertia when we prefer to trust somebody else, in order not to investigate, be vigilant, or act ourselves; selfishness when the desire to speak about our own affairs tempts us to confide in someone else; vanity when it concers something that we are proud of.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede - not because they have a hundred feet but because most people can't count above fourteen.
G. C. Lichtenberg
I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.
Arthur Schopenhauer
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position - a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, as so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.
Eckhart Tolle
Hast du es schon gelesen?", fragte er.Er spielte auf das Buch an, das ich bei ihm gekauft hatte."Ja. Es war anders als ich es in Erinnerung hatte, aber nicht schlecht."Das Buch war ein Kalssiker und ich hatte es als Kind mehrfach verschlungen."So ist das mit verlorenen Dingen", meinte Jacob und bot mir ein Glas grünen Tee an.
Anne Krüger
Here too it’s masquerade, I find: As everywhere, the dance of mind.I grasped a lovely masked procession,And caught things from a horror show…I’d gladly settle for a false impression,If it would last a little longer, though.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe