Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 10

Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
Alain de Botton
He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.
Hermann Hesse
In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.
Charles P. Enz
We are all potential of un-excited creativity
Natasha Tsakos
The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.
Albert Einstein
Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.
Alain de Botton
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Hermann Hesse
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
Alain de Botton
...for you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than force." Vesadeva to Siddartha
Hermann Hesse
...your tranquil yes to the changing over into the formless void of the unlimited.
Hermann Hesse
He who when called upon to speak a disagreeable truth tells it boldly and has done is both bolder and milder than he who nibbles in a low voice and never ceases nibbling.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
...and as far as talent is concerned, there will be such an excess that our artists will become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.
Hermann Hesse
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
What we understand and love understands and loves us also.
Robert Walser
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence
Albert Einstein
Truly, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts as this I, this riddle, the fact I am alive, that I am separated and isolated from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And about nothing in the world do I know less about than me, about Siddhartha!
Hermann Hesse
He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
E = MC^2: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
Albert Einstein
When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experience—an experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a summons to a life vocation. The imperative form of the poem which specially displeases you is not the expression of a command and a will to teach but a command and warning directed towards myself. Even if you were not fully aware of this, my friend, you could have read it in the closing lines. I experienced an insight, you see, a realization and an inner vision, and wished to impress and hammer the moral of this vision into myself. That is the reason why this poem has remained in my memory. Whether the verses are good or bad they have achieved their aim, for the warning has lived on within me and has not been forgotten. It rings anew for me again to-day, and that is a wonderful little experience which your scorn cannot take away from me.
Hermann Hesse
He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts.
Hermann Hesse
One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one's own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would wish to find the strength to beautify one's thoughts and to purify one's heart. It is everyone's hope and expectation to live in serenity and to plod along in transparency: the palms of the hands patiently directed towards heaven, at the heart of all this modernity.
Tariq Ramadan
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
Albert Einstein
PARAPHRASE: Genius is not that you are smarter than everyone else. It is that you are ready to receive the inspiration.
Albert Einstein
Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam?Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.
Albert Einstein
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.Carl JungSwiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)
C.G. Jung
He sat thus, lost in meditation, thinking Om, his soul as the arrow directed at Brahman.
Hermann Hesse
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Jean-Luc Goddard
I hate books they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
Albert Einstein
The framing of a problem is often far more essential than its solution
Albert Einstein
I look up at the painting. It's not even that interesting. Definitely doesn't grab me and shake my brain around like the meadow scene did.
Stefan Bachmann
Existentialism” is a thinkingThat no longer wishes to think; this means the destructionOf the true thinking that constitutes man.The existentialist fanaticsDislocate their brains for nothing — it is only a case ofSelf-delusion and self-promotion.For to think truly means: recollection.Let the fools spin their foolishness.-----“Daseinsphilosophie” — sie ist ein DenkenDes Nichtmehr-Denkenwollens: so ZerstörungDes wahren Denkens, das den Menschen macht.Die Existenz-Fanatiker verrenkenSich das Gehirn für nichts — nur SelbstbetörungUnd Selbstbespiegelung kommt in Betracht.Denn wirklich denken heißet: sich besinnen.Und lasst die Narren ihre Torheit spinnen.
Frithjof Schuon
Liberation from ego is what we shramanas are seeking, O Exalted One. If I were your disciple, O Venerable One, I'm afraid it might befall me that my ego would be pacified and liberated only seemingly, only illusorily, that in reality it would survive and grow great, for then I would make the teaching, my discipleship, my love for you, and the community of the monks into my ego!
Hermann Hesse
We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature's determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind--which they loved as much as we did--was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren't written down anywhere.
Hermann Hesse
The Wolf trots to and fro,The world lies deep in snow,The raven from the birch tree flies,But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe,The roe -she is so dear, so sweet -If such a thing I might surpriseIn my embrace, my teeth would meet,What else is there beneath the skies?The lovely creature I would so treasure,And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,I would drink of her red blood full measure,Then howl till the night went by.Even a hare I would not despise;Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.Is everything to be deniedThat could make life a little bright?The hair on my brush is getting grey.The sight is failing from my eyes.Years ago my dear mate died.And now I trot and dream of a roe.I trot and dream of a hare.I hear the wind of midnight howl.I cool with the snow my burning jowl,And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.
Hermann Hesse
I closed my eyes obediently; I felt a light kiss on my lips, on which there was always a little accumulation of blood that wouldn't decrease. And then I fell asleep
Hermann Hesse
When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock.So I stopped wearing socks.
Albert Einstein
I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.
Robert Walser
The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance onOur SOULS.
C.G. Jung
Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to be satisfied with that, and without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to set between them and us that glorious distinction which people made long ago between two great peoples: one knew how to speak well; the other how to act well.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.
C.G. Jung
He who is the most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in the performance of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the die will come up proximately 1 ,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come approximately up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable.But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term "probability" includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification. Cf. Ernst Mally's Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, von Mises' Probability, Statistics and Truth
Max Frisch
Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.
Alain de Botton
Still there are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.
Albert Einstein
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A robin perched on the branch of the apple tree, his feathers ruffled, his red chest blazing.'No need to look so down in the mouth,' he chirruped. 'Things'll get worse before they get better.''I don't know what it is about that tree,' Geno grumbled, 'that makes everything that sits in it talk in proverbs.''It's easier than thinking,' the robin stated.
Felix Salten
I cannot afford to waste my time making money.
Louis Agassiz
The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
Albert Einstein
We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Albert Einstein
Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.
Alice MIller
Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.
Hermann Hesse
And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.
Hermann Hesse
One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.
Robert Walser
All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.
Albert Einstein
Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden.. forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.
Hermann Hesse
Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge.
Albert Einstein
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Alain de Botton
The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.
Alain de Botton