Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 27

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
Albert Einstein
Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
Albert Einstein
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
Alain de Botton
Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.
Nicolas Bouvier
If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker.
Albert Einstein
The public doesn't want new music the main thing that it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
Arthur Honegger
A feeble body weakens the mind.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.
C.G. Jung
As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination, I am certain that there is an equally valid way that must lead the psychologist 'from behind' (namely, through investigating the archetypes) into the world of physics. As an example of background physics, I shall discuss a motif that occurs regularly in my dreams - namely, fine structure, in particular doublet structure of spectral lines and the separation of a chemical element into two isotopes.
Wolfgang Pauli
I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.
Hermann Hesse
You will never be free as long as there remains one Russian soldier in Poland and your freedom will always be threatened as long as Russia interferes in your affairs.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We don’t think, we think we think
Natasha Tsakos
A man must be able to cut a knot for everything cannot be untied he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped for everything cannot be equally considered in a word he must be able to simplify his duties his business and his life.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride—or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation—takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we fare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert—all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition.
Alain de Botton
Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing to pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.
Hermann Hesse
God is subtle but he is not malicious.
Albert Einstein
Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced.
Alain de Botton
Religious patients seemed to differ little from those without a religion.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
If you've never done anything wrong it's probably because you have never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein
You had an image of life inside you, a belief or an ideal, that you were ready to do good deeds, to suffer, and to sacrifice – and by degrees you noticed that the world had no need of your good deeds, or sacrifices, and such like; that life was not an heroic tale, with roles for heroes, and such like, but a comfortable bourgeois parlour, where one is perfectly satisfied with eating and drinking, coffee and knitted stockings, tarot readings and music on the radio. And he who wants otherwise and has the heroic and the beautiful inside him, the veneration of great poets or the adoration of saints inside him, he is a fool and a knight errant, a latter day Don Quixote?
Hermann Hesse
Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: "Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough."This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche.
C.G. Jung
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Madam, I have just come from a country where people are hanged if they talk.
Leonhard Euler
It is as if we need to be reminded of convention in order properly to appreciate the wonder of being unguarded...
Alain de Botton
Information is not knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Out of clutter, find simplicity.
Albert Einstein
Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.
Karl Barth
I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.
Robert Walser
Let twelve angels come into being to rule over chaos and the underworld." And look, from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means in translation 'rebel'; others call him Yaldabaoth.
Rodolphe Kasser
We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.
Alain de Botton
The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
Albert Einstein
Bambi was inspired, and said trembling, "There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him.
Felix Salten
The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If the past is no longer presentis it fiction?
Natasha Tsakos
Don’t force your gifts: if you are a rascal, live like one; if you are half honest, be half honest; if you are completely honest, live absolutely honestly.
Pierre Ceresole
At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.
Hermann Hesse
Just slowly, among his growing riches, Siddhartha had assumed something of the childlike people's ways for himself, something of their childlikeness and of their fearfulness. And yet, he envied them, envied them just the more, the more similar he became to them. He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had, the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes.
Hermann Hesse
For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
Hermann Hesse
The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.
Paul Klee
All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat.
Jean-Luc Godard
Be not another, if you can be yourself.
Paracelsus
If you hate a person you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
Hermann Hesse
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
Albert Einstein
Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
Albert Einstein
The world had been divided into two parts that sought to annihilate each other because they both desired the same thing, namely the liberation of the oppressed, the elimination of violence, and the establishment of permanent peace.
Hermann Hesse
It was so lovely, Heidi stood with tears pouring down her cheeks, and thanked God for letting her come home to it again. She could find no words to express her feelings, but lingered until the light began to fade and then ran on.
Johanna Spyri