Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 16

Love is a spendthrift leaves its arithmetic at home is always 'in the red'.
Paul Scherer
I would describe the distinction between city and landscape like this: cities tend to excite and agitate me; they make me feel big or small, self-confident, proud, curious, excited, tense, annoyed... or they intimidate me. But the landscape, if I give it the chance, offers me freedom and serenity. Nature has a different sense of time. Time is big in the landscape while in the city it is condensed, just like the city's space.
Peter Zumthor
The author says that theologian operates with windows open to the interest of the world, but also with a skylight that allows full awareness of prayer.
Karl Barth
Art’s only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality
Jean Rousset
Creativity is the residue of time wasted.
Albert Einstein
The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.
Alain de Botton
The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides never decides.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself.
Hermann Hesse
I am superior to you only in one point: I'm awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.
Hermann Hesse
All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.
Hermann Hesse
Just finished [Capitalist in North Korea]—fascinating! What an experience. Wow." —Justin Rohrlich, Emmy Award Winner, Head Writer, Minyanville's World In Review
Felix Abt
It considers this Jesus as ultimately decisive, definitive, archetypal for man in these various dimensions of his.
Hans Küng
In medicine sins of commission are mortal sins of omission venial.
Theodore Tronchin
Everyone is extremely hard and troubled to be around. Everyone has something substantially wrong with them. Everyone is extremely hard to live with. 
Alain de Botton
You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.
Hermann Hesse
Gandhi, the greatest political genius of our time, has pointed the way. He was shown of what sacrifices people are capable once they have found the right way. His work for the liberation of India is a living testimony to the fact that a will governed by firm conviction is stronger than a seemingly invincible material power.
Albert Einstein
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
C.G. Jung
From Hinduism to the monotheisms through to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the common message is that we are all, naturally and potentially, inclined to reject the other, and to be intolerant and racist. Left to our own devices and our own emotions, we can be deaf, blind, dogmatic, closed and xenophobic: we are not born open-minded, respectful and pluralist. We become so through personal effort, education, self-mastery and knowledge.
Tariq Ramadan
The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
Carl Jung
If a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star or some equally unattainable object, it wouldn't succeed. Only, it wouldn't even try in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it, what it needs, what is indispensable to its life... if I imagined that I wanted under all circumstances to get to the North Pole, then to achieve it I would have to desire it strongly enough that my whole being was ruled by it. But if I were to decide to will that the pastor should stop wearing his glasses, it would be useless. That would be making a game of it.
Hermann Hesse
The public forum is not, of course, the most helpful place to conduct a profitable confrontation with one's parents. If we are to allow the feelings of childhood to be revived, we need an enlightened witness and not the pent-up, undigested hatred of formerly abused children who, as adults, totally identify with the perpetrators. To expose oneself defenselessly to public view while harboring such feelings from childhood can amount to a kind of self-inflicted punishment, something one seeks when, in spite of everything, one still feels guilty at having expressed the criticism and is prepared to accept hate reactions as a well deserved punishment.
Alice MIller
Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.
Robert Walser
At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.
Alain de Botton
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
Alain de Botton
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
Hermann Hesse
I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.
Albert Einstein
Mankind's greatest gift... is that we have free choice.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.
Hermann Hesse
Shriveled apple cores stood side by side on the window sill, a long row of them with their seed chambers bitten open and the pointed sees scattered on the floor. The brown, discolored remnants of their flesh bore the imprint of his grandfather's teeth. That was the image This was left with, the one that ever since was the first to recur when he thought of his dead grandfather: shriveled apple cores on the sill of a window that looked out onto an overgrown garden.
Hansjörg Schertenleib
So finally we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because i made you strong enough not to fall in.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.
Albert Einstein
It was one of those happy days that God grants us sometimes on earth to give us an idea of the bliss of heaven.
Johann David Wyss
The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature, only as its counterpart.
Hermann Hesse
Science is no longer fiction,but Reality may become one.
Natasha Tsakos
There is in each person, in every animal, bird and plant a star which mirrors, matches or is in some sense the same as a star in the heavens.
Paracelsus
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is ... lack of faith.
Carl Jung
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Albert Einstein
history beats in longer periods than a man's heart
Henry Sigerist
In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a a habit of growing worrisome in its own way.
Alain de Botton
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces.
Hermann Hesse
The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.
Paul Tournier
If there is a smoke, there is a fire, the saying goes, That is quite true, but one should find what the fire is, and who lit it.
Tariq Ramadan
We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
C.G. Jung
The more we idealized the past, however, and refuse to acknowledge or childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.
Alice MIller
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the descernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.
Albert Einstein
I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
Hermann Hesse
I think and think for months for years. Ninety-nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
Albert Einstein
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
They had been talking about astrology, a forbidden science that was not pursued in the cloister. Narcissus had said that astrology was an attempt to arrange and order the many different types of human beings according to their natures and destinies. At this point Goldmund had objected: "You're forever talking of differences - I've finally recognised a pet theory of yours. When you speak of the great difference that is supposed to exist between you and me, for instance, it seems to me that this difference is nothing but your strange determination to establish differences."Narcissus: "Yes. You've hit the nail on the head. That's it: to you, differences are quite unimportant; to me, they are what matters most. I am a scholar by nature; science is my vocation. And science is, to quote your words, nothing but the 'determination to establish differences.' Its essence couldn't be defined more accurately. For us, the men of science, nothing is as important as the establishment of differences; science is the art of differentiation. Discovering in every man that which distinguishes him from others is to know him.
Hermann Hesse
The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
‎"...the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
C.G. Jung
But the answer isn't just to intimidate people into consuming more 'serious' news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences. It is too easy to claim that serious things must be, and can almost afford to be, a bit boring. The challenge is to transcend the current dichotomy between those outlets that offer thoughtful but impotent instruction on the one hand and those that provide sensationalism stripped of responsibility on the other.
Alain de Botton
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right a single experiment can prove me wrong.
Albert Einstein
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters
Albert Einstein
Hope that justice will be done to those brave men who stood up for their convictions.
Albert Einstein