Quotes by German Authors - Page 17

He that is overcautious will accomplish little.
Friedrich von Schiller
Let each look to himself and see what God wants of him and attend to this leaving all else alone.
Henry Suso
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
Friedrich Engels
I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.
Lilli Palmer
Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror.
Arthur Schopenhauer
If you cast away one cross you will certainly find another and perhaps a heavier.
Thomas à Kempis
Happy he who learns to bear what he cannot change!
J. C. F. von Schiller
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
Johann von Goethe
What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.
Friedrich Hölderlin
If you bear the cross unwillingly you make it a burden and load yourself more heavily but you must bear it.
Thomas à Kempis
It is almost more important how a person takes his fate than what it is.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
There is no man in this world without some manner of tribulation or anguish though he be king or pope.
Thomas à Kempis
Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way but must accept his lot calmly even if they roll a few more upon it.
Albert Schweitzer
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm
We must accept finite disappointment but we must never lose infinite hope.
Martin Luther King
For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.
Goethe
An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.
Werner Heisenberg
[I]n love, man declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart; … the life which he has through love to be the truly human life, … The individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite; … friendship is a means of virtue, and more: it is … dependent however on participation. … [I]t cannot be based on perfect similarity; on the contrary, it requires diversity, for friendship rests on a desire for self-contemplation. One friend obtains through the other what he does not himself possess. … However faulty a man may be, it is a proof that there is a germ of good in him if he has worthy men for his friends. If I cannot be myself perfect, I yet at least love virtue, perfection in others.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Why do I always forget that traffic is a social affair?
Stefan Emunds
[Men] act in response to an outward situation, and on being presented with an opportunity to conform to a pattern. If the pattern gives licence to cruelty, so much the better. They take advantage of the licence so thoughtlessly, so thoroughly, that it becomes perfectly clear: the generality of mankind are only waiting for the chance, only waiting for outward circumstance to sanction brutality and allow them to be cruel and brutal to their heart's content.
Thomas Mann
What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?
Bernhard Schlink
The fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right, is the right to life itself. This is true of life from the moment of conception until its natural end. Abortion, consequently, cannot be a human right -- it is the very opposite. It is a deep wound in society.
Pope Benedict XVI
First of all, they came to take the gypsiesand I was happy because they pilfered.Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing, because they were unpleasant to me.Then they came to take homosexuals,and I was relieved, because they were annoying me.Then they came to take the Communists,and I said nothing because I was not a Communist.One day they came to take me,and there was nobody left to protest.Bertold Brecht, inspired by Emil Gustav Friedrich Martin Niemöller
Bertolt Brecht
THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age.Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.
Hannah Arendt
Daily there have to be many troubles and trials in every house, city, and country. No station in life is free of suffering and pain, both from your own, like your wife or children or household help or subjects, and from the outside, from your neighbors and all sorts of accidental trouble.
Martin Luther
Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living - show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = 'naked'), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect, demonstrate to us that achievement - excellence, arete, virtu - has not remained a foreign word to you, admit that you have motives for new endeavours! Above all: only grant the suspicion that sport is a pastime for the most stupid as much space as it deserves, do not misuse it as a pretext to drift further in your customary state of self-neglect, distrust the philistine in yourself who thinks you are just fine as you are! Hear the voice from the stone, do not resist the call to get in shape! Seize the chance to train with a god!
Peter Sloterdijk
Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble.
William Joyce
the rent is a little higher herebut so far I've been able to pay itand that's a miracle toolike still maybe being sanewhile thinking of guns and sidewalksand old ladies in libraries.
Charles Bukowski
He wants to be grown-up. How different dreams can be! Nature will soon grant your wish.
Cornelia Funke
The essence of faith … is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists[.]
Ludwig Feuerbach
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.
Novalis
Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.
Novalis
The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.
Charles Bukowski
it doesn't matter if Prince Charles falls off his horseor that the hummingbird is so seldomseenor that we are too senseless to goinsane.coffee. give us more of that NOTHINGcoffee.
Charles Bukowski
In your heart of hearts, I believe all of you around this table know what this country needs.
Timur Vermes
But with superior morale, with an unwavering, fanatical spirit, everything is possible!
Timur Vermes
The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a "voice crying in the wilderness", but only if that voice remains lively and uncompromising, it is possible to transform the desert into fertile land.
Erich Fromm
No politician should ever let himself be photographed in a bathing suit.
Adolf Hitler
What light is to the outer physical world intellect is to the inner world of consciousness. For intellect is related to the will, and thus also to the organism which is nothing other than will regarded objectively, in the approximate same way as light is to a combustible body and the oxygen in combination with which it ignites.
Arthur Schopenhauer
[I]n other words, we should live with due knowledge of the course of things in the world. For whenever a man in any way loses self-control, or is struck down by a misfortune, grows angry, or loses heart, he shows in this way that he finds things different from what he expected, and consequently that he laboured under a mistake, did not know the world and life, did not know how at every step the will of the individual is crossed and thwarted by the chance of inanimate nature, by contrary aims and intentions, even by the malice inspired in others. Therefore either he has not used his reason to arrive at a general knowledge of this characteristic of life, or he lacks the power of judgement, when he does not again recognize in the particular what he knows in general, and when he is therefore surprised by it and loses his self-control. Thus every keen pleasure is an error, an illusion, since no attained wish can permanently satisfy, and also because every possession and every happiness is only lent by chance for an indefinite time, and can therefore be demanded back in the next hour. Thus both originate from defective knowledge. Therefore the wise man always holds himself aloof from jubilation and sorrow, and no event disturbs his ἀταραξία [ataraxia]."—from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Paye in two volumes: volume I, p. 88
Arthur Schopenhauer
Of the spirit of women. - The spiritual power of a woman is best demonstrated by her sacrificing her own spirit to that of a man out of love of him and of his spirit but then, despite this sacrifice, immediately evolving _a new spirit_ within the new domain, originally alien to her nature, to which the man's disposition impels her. (from Assorted Opinions & Maxims 272)-- This is the first time among years of reading Nietzsche that i agree with his words on women: this aphorism captures a few quintessences of true and gallant womanhood, namely the will(ingness) to sacrifice (not only to others but also to the necessity that arises in a context), the balance between creative and reactive, the free-spiritedness out of such balance without conceit and swagger, and the malleability/fluidity without blind submission. (It is momentous to note that the man-woman dynamic is not binary, and that man/womanhood is not a given in one's biology - it's more something that evolves in a person over time.)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Friedrich Schlegel
This is the beginning of the end (talking about the war)... Everyone was saying... But the British Prime Minister said, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Do you see the difference?
Anne Frank
If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.
Albert Einstein
What an abundant harvest has been collected in autumn! The earth has now fulfilled its design for this year, and is going to repose for a short time. Thus nature is continually employed during the greatest part of the year: even in her rest she is active: and in silence prepares a new creation.
Christoph Christian Sturm
I like your opera - I think I will set it to music
Ludwig van Beethoven
... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.
Max Weber
To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.
Arthur Schopenhauer
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses re-open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. This second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before he merged as an “individual,” for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatening panic; it is also characterized by the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. Thus it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; yet it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities.
Erich Fromm
One might have to be a little ruthless to seize back control of one's life, don't you think?
Nina George
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, who ever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my own smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my father, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
Hermann Hesse
The very idea of "managing" a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing.
Bernd Heinrich
Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge
Jan Valtin
That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier...
Hermann Hesse
Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
Erwin Knoll