Quotes by German Authors - Page 102

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I have forgotten my umbrella.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.
Friedrich Nietzsche
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
Arthur Schopenhauer
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
Arthur Schopenhauer
You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
Arthur Schopenhauer
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone is the other and no one is himself.
Martin Heidegger
Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.
Novalis
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
Martin Heidegger
Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.
Max Stirner
Plato was a bore.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I would prefer a sword to fight duel, but a pen to plan a war.
Robert Thier
Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I am one thing, my writings are another.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Knowledge is power is time is money.
Robert Thier
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage
Friedrich Nietzsche
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
Albert Einstein
Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure
Arthur Schopenhauer
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.
Erich Fromm
Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Albert Einstein
Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
Charles Bukowski
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Albert Einstein
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Music is ... A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy
Ludwig van Beethoven
If you win, you need not have to explain...If you lose, you should not be there to explain!
Adolf Hitler
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his 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. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.
Arthur Schopenhauer
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
Werner Heisenberg
A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon.
Johannes Brahms
Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.
Henry Kissinger
What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.
Charles Bukowski
To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive at all. I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be under there. It might not be the standard thing. Imagine, stripping a woman down, and she has a body like a little submarine. With periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would be the one for me. I'd marry her right off and be faithful to the end.
Charles Bukowski
...[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).
Karl Marx
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
Albert Einstein
There's only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and foget everybody else! It sound egotistical, but it's actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity.
Anne Frank
An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.
Albert Einstein
Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilization in high boots
Albert Einstein
In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke.
Hermann Hesse
Yes Yeswhen God created love he didn't help most when God created dogs He didn't help dogs when God created plants that was average when God created hate we had a standard utility when God created me He created me when God created the monkey He was asleep when He created the giraffe He was drunk when He created narcotics He was high and when He created suicide He was low when He created you lying in bed He knew what He was doing He was drunk and He was high and He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time He made some mistakes but when He created you lying in bed He came all over His Blessed Universe.
Charles Bukowski
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking
Albert Einstein
Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
Charles Bukowski
So what? All writers are lunatics!
Cornelia Funke