Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 21

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
Albert Einstein
A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows.
Albert Einstein
The person who prays and who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the word he desires to worship (in order to be more single-mindedly at the word’s disposal) will select with great care basic works for his studies which will observe the so-called exactitude of scholarship without losing sight of the most important exactitude, namely, the ordering of all thought toward prayer.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
There is no reality except the one contained within us.
Hermann Hesse
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
Hard by the church stood the public house; so often the two are closely conjoined, honorably sharing both joys and sorrows.
Jeremias Gotthelf
It is not against the law to drink in public places, and you will see people drinking in parks or by the lake. The Swiss have a more relaxed attitude to alcohol consumption. From the age of 16, young people can be served beer or wine in a bar.
Clare O'Dea
The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!
C.G. Jung
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
Food cannot take care of spiritual, psychological and emotional problems, but the feeling of being loved and cared for, the actual comfort of the beauty and flavour of food, the increase of blood sugar and physical well-being, help one to go on during the next hours better equipped to meet the problems (p. 124).
Edith Schaeffer
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
The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify.
Alain de Botton
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
Alain de Botton
It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature.
Albert Hofmann
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
If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.
Piaget
Never again!" commanded his will. "Again! Tomorrow!" begged his heart.
Hermann Hesse
Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far).
Alain de Botton
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
Titles are prisons of human potential
Natasha Tsakos
Theology must have the character of a living procession.
Karl Barth
You know you are changing when you no longer have points of references. Mapping a new life.
Natasha Tsakos
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
Happy am I, for every time I meditate on governments, I always find new reasons in my inquiries for loving my own country.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.(on being 36 yrs old)
C.G. Jung
For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.
Isabelle Eberhardt
Very frequently feminine activity also expresses itself in what is largely a retrospectively oriented pondering over what we ought to have done differently in life and how we ought to have done it or as if under compulsion we make up strings of causal connections. We like to call this thinking though on the contrary it is a form of mental activity that is strangely pointless and unproductive a form that really leads only to self-torture.
Emma Jung
I believe in intuitions and inspirations...I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am.
Albert Einstein
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
Albert Einstein
Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.
Pascal Mercier
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
The question that sometime's drive's me hazy, am i or the other's crazy?
Albert Einstein
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
Alain de Botton
He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
Alain de Botton
A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cleverness is serviceable for everything sufficient for nothing.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Relationships must be fostered as far as possible and maintained, and thus a morbid transference can be avoided.
Carl Jung
A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought.
Karl Barth
When we first got married, we made a pact. It was this: In our life together, it was decided I would make all of the big decisions and my wife would make all of the little decisions. For fifty years, we have held true to that agreement. I believe that is the reason for the success in our marriage. However, the strange thing is that in fifty years, there hasn’t been one big decision.
Albert Einstein
Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are...
Max Frisch
Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
Albert Einstein
For one scant day he had loved himself, felt himself to be unified and whole, not split into hostile parts; he had loved himself and the world and God in himself, and everywhere he went he had met nothing but love, approval, and joy.
Hermann Hesse
Almost everything comes from almost nothing.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.
C.G. Jung
I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called "the world," and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.
Robert Walser
Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.
Hermann Hesse
For us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.
Albert Einstein
I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.
Albert Einstein
At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, All the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, Everything was transformed and enchanted, everything made sense.
Hermann Hesse
All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.
Paracelsus
There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. Thee is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and so dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.
Hermann Hesse
The rich believe that their money will insulate them from setbacks and frustrations, and that's one of the absurdist expectations of all.
Alain de Botton
What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.
Alice MIller
From this moment there would be no question of virtue or morality; for despotism cui ex honesto nulla est spes, wherever it prevails, admits no other master; it no sooner speaks than probity and duty lose their weight and blind obedience is the only virtue which slaves can still practice.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive
Albert Einstein
In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.
C.G. Jung
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
C.G. Jung
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
Alain de Botton