Quotes by German Authors - Page 78

Gregor flushed as he went on: "The entire content of the Confesions could be put into one single sentence in the book: when Augustine addresses God, saying: 'Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is unquiet until it rests in Thee.' This sentence, my lords and friends, is immortal. It contains the very heart of religion.
Louis de Wohl
Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He who sleeps does not sin.
Martin Luther
[I do not believe] in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.
Max Planck
What you can do or dream you can do begin it boldness has genius power and magic in it.
Johann von Goethe
You must know, my own love, that in each element there exists a race of beings, whose form scarcely differs from yours, but who very seldom appear to mortal sight … you now see before you, my love, an undine.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué
From desire I plunge to its fulfilment where I long once more for desire.
Goethe
Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.
Bertolt Brecht
I think . . . you should have children, John." At least he's no longer talking about bugs."I'm too young, Dad.""It's the most important thing . . . I've done in . . . my life.
Ursula Hegi
Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary... •tIf you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way.
Arthur Schopenhauer
They walked, and the long waves rolled and murmured rhythmically beside them; the fresh salty wind blew free and unobstructed in their faces, wrapped itself around their ears, and made them feel slightly numb and deliciously dizzy. They walked along in that wide, peaceful, whispering hush of the sea that gives every sound, near or far, some mysterious importance.
Thomas Mann
The main thing is to make history, not to write it
Otto von Bismarck
He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
Charles Bukowski
I believe in intuitions and inspirations...I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am.
Albert Einstein
When you know as much as we do, nothing matters. Things just repeat. Day and night, summer and winter. The world is empty and aimless. Everything circles around. Whatever starts up must pass away,whatever is born must die. It all cancels out, good or bad, beautiful or ugly.
Michael Ende
Time is a part of eternity and of the same piece with it.
Moses Mendelssohn
Everything is boring, boredom is the other epidemic which is making Europe ripe for decline. Boredom is the end product of each and every civilization. It is the arteriosclerosis of the great thinking peoples. The moment always arrives where even God, whether he’s called Zeus, Zebaoth or Zoroaster, has finished creating the universe and asks: “What’s the point of it, actually?” He yawns and chucks it aside. Mankind does the same with civilization. Boredom is the condition of a people which no longer believes but all the same is doing just fine. Boredom is when every clock in the country is predestined to be correct. When the same naive flowers blossom again in the month of March. When every day the deaths of good family fathers are announced in the papers. When a war breaks out in the Balkans. When poems go on about the stars. Boredom is a symptom of aging. Boredom is the diagnosis that talent and virtue are slowly being spent. Boredom is the life-long determination to a form of being which has worn itself out.
Iwan Goll
Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.
Friedrich Schiller
If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.
Charles Bukowski
As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nothing succeeds like success; children who opt out of school have had a continued record of failure, and it would be difficult to blame the children themselves for voting with their feet and playing truant as much as possible. This failure is not necessary; it is imposed on the children by inappropriate methods of teaching which do not take into account the innate patterns of abilities of these children. A return to sanity is long overdue; we must pay close attention to the genetic basis of our children`s abilities.
Hans Jürgen Eysenck
Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Imagine a wall that's green on one side and red on the other. You stand on one side and only see green. I stand on the other side and only see red. We'll both be right about the color we see, even though we disagree on what color the wall is. Being able to realize that the other person has a valid point, even if you disagree with it, that's maturity.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction.
Walter Moers
Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it
Karl Marx
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
Albert Einstein
Our fragile, perishable bodies are not who we are. We are the sum of fleeting moments that belong to us for eternity. It is our choice and responsibility to create moments of beauty and grace, instead of despair and suffering.
Dorit Brauer
History is written by the victors.
Walter Benjamin
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
Theodor W. Adorno
A clever man commits no minor blunders.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wherever you turn, you can find someone who needs you. Even if it is a little thing, do something for which there is no pay but the privilege of doing it. Remember, you don't live in a world all of your own.
Albert Schweitzer
He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
Albert Einstein
Im Verlaufe nicht nur der ökonomischen, sondern auch der politischen Globalisierung kann das kardinale völkerrechtliche Prinzip der Nichteinmischung in Gefahr geraten. Besonders gilt dies für dasVerhältnis des Westens zur islamischen Kultur. Vornehmlich von meinem toten muslimischen Freunde Anwar as-Sadat habe ich den Respekt gegenüber anderen Religionen gelernt. Ich habe von ihm gelernt die gleichen Wurzeln von Judentum und Christentum und Islam. Und inzwischen habe ich ausserdem gelernt, dass Konfuzius, Sokrates oder Lao Tse und ebenso Zarathustra und Gautama Buddha ein halbes Jahrtausend, Moses oder Echnaton ein ganzes Jahrtausend vor Jesus von Nazareth gelebt haben - und dass sie wahrscheinlich deswegen doch nicht unglücklicher gewesen sind als wir Heutigen. Unter den globalisierten Umständen der heutigen Menschheit geziemt jedermann Respekt und Toleranz gegenüber den Kulturen der anderen.
Helmut Schmidt
If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.
Eckhart Tolle
The question that sometime's drive's me hazy, am i or the other's crazy?
Albert Einstein
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of its trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse for impossibility, for it thinks all things are lawful for itself and all things are possible
Thomas à Kempis
No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay. Now, we do not owe gratitude to ourselves. To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.
Josef Pieper
I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.
Anne Frank
Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse. (What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
Herbert Marcuse
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Time is that in which all things pass away.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The Church is the Church only when it exists for others...not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.
Anne Frank
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Tomorrow I plan to work work from early until late. In fact I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.
Martin Luther
Where there is lasting love there is a family.
Shere Hite
Whoever is free from prejudice should be ready to face misunderstanding.
Lion Feuchtwanger
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Enlightenment arrives like a thief in the middle of the dark night of the soul.
Stefan Emunds
The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which can happen in many other situations), but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom—a fight possible under tyranny, and even under the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any conditions of concentration-camp life). Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were "born" free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature. Yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society—more than the abstract nakedness of beig human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.
Hannah Arendt
It is good for us to have trials and troubles at times, for they often remind us that we are on probation and ought not to hope in any worldly thing. It is good for us sometimes to suffer contradiction, to be misjudged by men even though we do well and mean well. These things help us to be humble and shield us from vainglory. When to all outward appearances men give us no credit, when they do not think well of us, then we are more inclined to seek God Who sees our hearts. Therefore, a man ought to root himself so firmly in God that he will not need the consolations of men.
Thomas à Kempis
He looked around. The room, a few suitcases, some belongings, a handful of well-read books— a man needed few things to live. And it was good not to get used to many things when life was unsettled. Again and again one had to abandon them or they were taken away. One should be ready to leave every day. That was the reason he had lived alone— when one was on the move one should not have anything that could bind one. Nothing that could stir the heart. The adventure— but nothing more.
Erich Maria Remarque
Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is his continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.
Gustav Fechner
The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to no
Rudolf Clausius