Quotes by German Authors - Page 28

I have been asked what I mean by “word of honor.” I will tell you. Place me behind prison walls—walls of stone ever so high, ever so thick, reaching ever so far into the ground—there is a possibility that in some way or another I might be able to escape; but stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of that circle? No, never! I’d die first.
Karl G. Maeser
Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.
Hermann Rauschning
The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I was like a turd that drew flies instead of like a flower that butterflies and bees desired. I wanted to live alone,I felt best being alone, cleaner,,,
Charles Bukowski
Thus it is with proud silly people, who think themselves above everyone else, and are too proud to ask or take advice.
Wilhelm Grimm
I quite enjoy the lines on my forehead because they show my life. That’s my history and I like to see that in other people. Like this wrinkle is due to some girl who broke my heart. I don’t want to escape it in any way.
Michael Fassbender
Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped. Then there was a short period when you weren't with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal, as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you. I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.
Charles Bukowski
The man of courage thinks not of himself. Help the oppressed and put thy trust in God.
Friedrich Schiller
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Books aren’t eggs, you know. Simply because a book has aged a bit doesn’t mean it’s gone bad.” There was now an edge to Monsieur Perdu’s voice too. “What is wrong with old? Age isn’t a disease. We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?
Nina George
When I say to the Moment flying;'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!'Then bind me in thy bonds undying,And my final ruin I will bear!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how or where they grew up, once they get to the audition, all the actresses act in the same way and read the same lines. They all become the same character.
Oliver Markus
When you push someone's head under water for 5 minutes, they will drown. It doesn't matter if the person is a sinner or a saint. It's just a natural process. If their head is under water, the lack of oxygen will make them drown. That rule applies to everyone, good or bad, equally. It doesn't matter if the drowning person has strong moral fiber.And it doesn't matter if you're a good or a bad person, once you become addicted to drugs. What happens next is inevitable. It's a natural process that happens in everyone's brain, once the drugs take over. So don't ever fool yourself into thinking that only weak or bad people get addicted.
Oliver Markus
Being mad at a drug addict for doing what drug addicts do, is like being mad at a shark for doing what sharks do, or being mad at a cockroach for doing what cockroaches do.
Oliver Markus
Sometimes the only reason why you won't let go of someone making you sad is because he was the only one that once made you happy.
Lily Amis
you've got to know when to let a woman go if you want to keep her,and if you don't want to keep her you let her go anyhow so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other.
Charles Bukowski
A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are hardly worth considering.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
Hannah Arendt
The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.
Ernst Jünger
The esoteric finds the Absolute within the traditions, as poets find poetry within the poems.
Frithjof Schuon
To the Greeks, the word "character" first referred to the stamp upon a coin. By extension, man was the coin, and the character trait was the stamp imprinted upon him. To them, that trait, for example bravery, was a share of something all mankind had, rather than means of distinguishing one from the whole.
Edith Hamilton
They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.
Hermann Hesse
The risen Lord is the new Temple, the real meeting place between God and man.
Pope Benedict XVI
Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
Hermann Hesse
Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.
Charles Bukowski
DEATH COMES SLOWLY LIKE ANTS TO A FALLEN FIG
Charles Bukowski
I have already lived long enough, Manon had written in late autumn, on an autumn day like today. I have lived and loved, I have had the best of this world. Why cry over the ending? Why cling to what remains? The advantage of dying is that you stop being afraid of it. There is a sense of peacefulness too.
Nina George
It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.
Richard Courant
Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
Günter Grass
And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know it ceases to exist. A moment that transforms us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next. The moment when a lover confesses that there's someone else and that he's leaving. Or the day we bury a father or mother or best friend. Or the moment when the doctor informs us of a malignant brain tumor. Or are such moments merely the dramatic conclusions of lengthier processes, conclusions we could have foreseen if we had only read the portents rather than disregarding them?And if these turning points are real, are we aware of them as they happen, or do we recognize the discontinuity only much later, in hindsight?
Jan-Philipp Sendker
sleeping in the rain helps me forget things like I am going todie and you are going to die and the cats are going to diebut it's still good to stretch out and know you have arms andfeet and a head, hands, all the parts, even eyes to closeoncemore, it really helps to know these things, to know youradvantagesand your limitations, but why do the cats have to die, Ithink that theworld should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, justcats andrain, rain and cats, very nice, goodnight.
Charles Bukowski
A fish tank is just interactive television for cats.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Women are still cats and birds. Or at the best, cows.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The factories, the jails, the drunken days and nights, the hospitals have weakened and shaken me like a mouse in the mouth of a hip-cat: life.- from an Aug. 1965 letter to Jim Roman "On Cats
Charles Bukowski
The cat is the beutiful devil. And here we can use the word, even without the “a.”- from a Dec. 21 1960, a letter to Sheri Martinelli"On Cats
Charles Bukowski
I felt like a still live fish on ice in a butcher’s counter on Friday morning.- On Cats
Charles Bukowski
Stuffed cats are able to creep more convincingly than live ones.
Günter Grass
Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, just look at the cats, you'll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is.
Charles Bukowski
I am sad for the dead and I am sad for the livingbut not for my 5 cats
Charles Bukowski
Cats tell me without effort all that there is to know.
Charles Bukowski
Knowing one's 'individuality'. - We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression that we make.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every system of power in the world has a vested interest in weakening the individuality of its subjects and tries to weaken or it possible completely extinguish it.
Christa Wolf
for meobedience to another is the decay of self.for though every being is similareach being is differentand to herd our differencesunder one lawdegrades each self.
Charles Bukowski
They had been talking about astrology, a forbidden science that was not pursued in the cloister. Narcissus had said that astrology was an attempt to arrange and order the many different types of human beings according to their natures and destinies. At this point Goldmund had objected: "You're forever talking of differences - I've finally recognised a pet theory of yours. When you speak of the great difference that is supposed to exist between you and me, for instance, it seems to me that this difference is nothing but your strange determination to establish differences."Narcissus: "Yes. You've hit the nail on the head. That's it: to you, differences are quite unimportant; to me, they are what matters most. I am a scholar by nature; science is my vocation. And science is, to quote your words, nothing but the 'determination to establish differences.' Its essence couldn't be defined more accurately. For us, the men of science, nothing is as important as the establishment of differences; science is the art of differentiation. Discovering in every man that which distinguishes him from others is to know him.
Hermann Hesse
Every human being is a world in miniature. It has its own centre of observation, its own way of forming concepts and of arriving at conclusions, its own degree of sensibility, its own life's work to do, and its own destiny to reach. All these features may be encompassed by general conditions, governed by general laws, and subject to unforeseen influences and incidents, but within the sphere of their own activity, they constitute that great principle which we call individuality.
Karl G. Maeser
and beware those whoonly takeinstructions from theirGodfor they havefailed completely to live their ownlives.
Charles Bukowski
If the chick is not able to break the shell of his egg, he will die without being born. We are - chick. The world - is our egg. If we do not break the shell of the world, then we will die without being born
Hermann Hesse
In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?
Erich Fromm
The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
Albert Einstein
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.
Friedrich Schiller
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Friedrich Nietzsche
At the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done.
Thomas à Kempis
Briefly, in the act of composition, as an instrument there intervenes and is most potent, fire, flaming, fervid, hot; but in the very substance of the compound there intervenes, as an ingredient, as it is commonly called, as a material principle and as a constituent of the whole compound the material and principle of fire, not fire itself. This I was the first to call phlogiston.
Georg Ernst Stahl
Windisch closes his eyes. He feels his eyes. He feels his eyeballs in his hands. His eyes without a face.
Herta Müller
Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.
Albert Einstein