Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 23

After all, one travels in order for things to happen and change; otherwise you might as well stay at home.
Nicolas Bouvier
This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering…Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?
Alice MIller
Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...
Alain de Botton
And the pine trees that smell so wonderfully of spicy power. Shall I never see a mountain pine again? Really that would be no misfortune. To forgo something: that also has its fragrance and its power.
Robert Walser
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
Whoever wants to hide a big scandal is best to stage a small one
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
I have been under the influence- of boggling information over the years.
Natasha Tsakos
And those of us who trust ourselves the least,Who doubt and question most, these, it may be,Will make their mark upon eternity,And youth will turn to them as to a feast.The time may come when a man who confessedHis self-doubts will be ranked among the blessedWho never suffered anguish or knew fear,Whose times were times of glory and good cheer,Who lived like children, simple happy lives.For in us too is part of that Eternal MindWhich through the aeons calls to brothers of its kind:Both you and I will pass, but it survives.
Hermann Hesse
The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.
David Gianadda
This prolific and inventive photographer (Edward Steichen) must be given credit for virtually inventing modern fashion photography, and as the tohousands of high-quality original prints in the Conde Nast archives prove, only Irving Penn and Richard Avedon have since emerged as serious historical rivals.
William A. Ewing
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Sensation tell us a thing is.Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.
C.G. Jung
On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.
Alain de Botton
...the dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now... To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap - it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself - the only marked by events - along on this journey.
Pascal Mercier
Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance.
J. Petit-Senn
Time is an illusion.
Albert Einstein
...the opposite of every truth is just as true! That is to say, any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything that can be thought with the mind and said with words is one-sided, it's all just the half of it, lacking completeness, roundness, or unity.
Hermann Hesse
It was a strange business and it made a sad and curious impression on me; everything that had belonged to me in these earlier years of my life left me, was alien and lost to me. I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.
Hermann Hesse
The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself.
Hermann Hesse
The more you look into and understand yourself, the less judgmental you become towards others.
Tariq Ramadan
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
C.G. Jung
What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think
Albert Einstein
Perfection lies in fullness of journey. For this reason, never think you have arrived. Forget what lies behind you, reach out for what lies before you. Through the very change in which you lose what you have snatched up you will at last be transformed into what you crave for with such longing.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Adversity introduces a man to himself.
Albert Einstein
The righteousness of God in His election means, then, that as a righteous Judge God perceives and estimates as such the lost cause of the creature, and that in spite of its opposition He gives sentence in its favour, fashioning for it His own righteousness.
Karl Barth
One eye sees, the other feels.
Paul Klee
Our concern must be to live while we're alive ... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Try not to become a man of success but rather a man of value.
Albert Einstein
The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
...I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are.
Felix Salten
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Albert Einstein
I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks
C.G. Jung
We can’t fear the future with a present mindset. We must ask ourselves questions we do not know the answers to, we should disrupt ourselves to grow.
Natasha Tsakos
Nothing happens until something moves.
Albert Einstein
The “music of decline” had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.
Hermann Hesse
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
Alain de Botton
[T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton
Se aburren quienes se pasan la vida esperando que algo los estimule desde fuera...
Robert Walser
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opin
Albert Einstein
Women, for their part, are always complaining that we raise them only to be vain and coquettish, that we keep them amused with trifles so that we may more easily remain their masters; they blame us for the faults we attribute to them. What stupidity! And since when is it men who concern themselves with the education of girls? Who is preventing the mothers from raising them as they please? There are no schools for girls—what a tragedy! Would God, there were none for boys! They would be raised more sensibly and more straightforwardly. Is anyone forcing your daughters to waste their time on foolish trifles? Are they forced against their will to spend half their lives on their appearance, following your example? Are you prevented from instructing them, or having them instructed according to your wishes? Is it our fault if they please us when they are beautiful, if their airs and graces seduce us, if the art they learn from you attracts and flatters us, if we like to see them tastefully attired, if we let them display at leisure the weapons with which they subjugate us? Well then, decide to raise them like men; the men will gladly agree; the more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is a Revolution, it’s a human and technological revolution
Natasha Tsakos
I was not a good scholar, and during my last year at school I made little effort. This was not due to laziness … , but to a state of youthful day-dreaming and indifference … that was only … pierced when creative desire enveloped me like ether.
Hermann Hesse
The stationary condition is the beginning of the end
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
Alain de Botton
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.
C.G. Jung
The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.
Alain de Botton
Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.
Isabelle Eberhardt
Haven't you got it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past & that philosophy is worse than Bertillon's guide to harassed cops? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral & animal, all disorder, & so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business & the arts, & all theories, passions & systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action subjected to every possible & imaginable contingency & contradiction. Life. Life is a crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?
Blaise Cendrars
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein
So... are you also chasing butterflies?
Natasha Tsakos
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
Jean-Luc Godard
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.
Albert Einstein
There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be.
Alain de Botton
Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It is good," he thought "to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it. And now I know it, I know it not only because I remember hearing it, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. And it is good for me to know it!
Hermann Hesse
To eliminate the discrepancy between men's plans and the results achieved, a new approach is necessary. Morphological thinking suggests that this new approach cannot be realized through increased teaching of specialized knowledge. This morphological analysis suggests that the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius. Education and dissemination of knowledge must assume a form which allows each student to absorb whatever develops his own genius, lest he become frustrated. The same outlook applies to the genius of the peoples as a whole.
Fritz Zwicky
Thankfulness is the beginning of gratitude. Gratitude is the completion of thankfulness. Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel