Quotes by German Authors - Page 29

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.
Thomas Mann
And he wallowed in disgust and loathing, and his hair stood on end at the delicious horror.
Patrick Süskind
National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Find an enemy for life and you've no more need of a doctor.
Sascha Arango
Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder when, with a terror-inspiring ingenuity, he placed above the gateway of his hell the inscription, 'I too was created by eternal love'--at any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian Paradise...the inscription 'I too was created by eternal hate'...
Friedrich Nietzsche
there is enough treachery , hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day
Charles Bukowski
the kiss and the bite are such close cousins that in the heat of love they are too readily confounded
Heinrich von Kleist
…in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him—in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for—that other people should love him—became at the moment of his achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated.
Patrick Süskind
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid one are full of confidence".
Charles Bukowski
Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The real madness probably is not another thing that the wisdom itself that, tired of discovering the shames of the world, has taken the intelligent resolution to become mad
Heinrich Heine
For him, behind every feeling and thought was the sense of the open door leading into nothingness. To be sure, he suffered from dread of many things, of madness, the police, insomnia, and also dread of death. But everything he dreaded he likewise desired and longed for at the same time. He was full of burning curiosity about suffering, destruction, persecution, madness and death.
Hermann Hesse
The picture of the bacchante who stands motionless and stares into space must have been well known. Catullus is thinking of her when he tells of the abandoned Ariadne, who follows her faithless lover with sorrowing eyes as she stands on the reedy shore ‘like the picture of a maenad.’ Indeed, melancholy silence becomes the sign of women who are possessed by Dionysus. […]Madness dwells in the surge of clanging, shrieking, and pealing sounds, it dwells also in silence. The women who follow Dionysus get their name, maenads, from this madness. Possessed by it, they rush off, whirl madly in circles, or stand still, as if turned to stone.
Walter F. Otto
The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.
Karl Weierstrass
... a thing can only live through a pious illusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity's turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left - indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages - for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifically explored and technically outdone. After this shift, 'being perfect' takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their turn: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection.
Peter Sloterdijk
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
Even when we strive for perfection, life is nothing more than an attempt to achieve it through a series of greater or smaller imperfections.
Peter Prange
A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Advent creates people, new people.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god’s knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don’t share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death.
Marcus Speh
Atreyu was fighting not for himself, but for his friend, whom he was trying to save by defeating him.
Michael Ende
Equality before the enemy -that is the main condition to fight a fair duel. Where you have contempt, you cannot wage war; where you are in command, where you can see someone beneath you, you should not wage war.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa-- blessing it rather than in love with it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
‎"The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We cannot fetch them all in, if we did we should not know what to do with them. The shells will bury them...
Enrich M. Remarque
To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.
Herta Müller
He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within.
Hans Keilson
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there
Friedrich Nietzsche
My father, my father, and dost thou not hearThe words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?'Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Wherever you turn, you can find someone who needs you. Even if it is a little thing, do something for which there is no pay but the privilege of doing it. Remember, you don't live in a world all of your own.
Albert Schweitzer
It's inspiration that counts, not the drill.
Hugo Ball
The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.
Friedrich Nietzsche
God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A man who needs the unusual to make him "wonder" shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being. The itch for sensation, even though disguised in the mask of Boheme, is a sure indication of a bourgeois mind and a deadened sense of wonder.
Josef Pieper
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
Albert Einstein
In the meantime, when he went on his way back, the seed had grown into a tree which reached up to the sky. Then thought the peasant, 'As thou hast the chance, thou must just see what the angels are doing up there above, and for once have them before thine eyes.' So he climbed up, and saw that the angels above were threshing oats, and he looked on.
Jacob Grimm
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
Every day you face two important decisions: what effect you want your speech and actions to have on the world around you, and what impressions and vibrations you want to be receptive to.
Kalashatra Govinda
the Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.
Martin Luther
yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut
Charles Bukowski
now look, she said, stretched out on the bed, I don’t want anything personal, let’s just do it, I don’t want to get involved, got it? she kicked off her high-heeled shoes… sure, he said, standing there, let’s just pretend that we’ve already done it, there’s nothing less involved than that, is there? what the hell do you mean? she asked. I mean, he said, I’d rather drink anyhow. and he poured himself one. it was a lousy night in Vegas and he walked to the window and looked out at the dumb lights. you a fag? she asked, you a god damned fag? no, he said. you don’t have to get shitty,...
Charles Bukowski
First class Manager hire first class leader, second class Manager hire third class manager and third class manager fire first class leader.
Carsten K. Rath
Io, Europa, Ganimedes puer, atque Calistolascivo nimium perplacuere Iovi.(Io, Europa, the boy Ganymede, and Callisto greatly pleased lustful Jupiter.)[Marius naming Jupiter's moons]
Simon Marius
Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
There you have it! - How they anticipate my wishes, how they grant friendship's little attentions, which are worth a thousand times more than breathtaking presents that merely prove the giver's vanity and humiliate us.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I have one aim only: to impart a fraction of the meaning of the word now.
Frederick Salomon Perls
Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
Bertolt Brecht
Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty. I cannot say I despise you - for I am honest. You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge - you see how honourable I am - and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed. -
Thomas Mann
What was she hoping to gain from his death? That it would numb the pain of his betrayal, or heal her injured pride? Her red sister didn't know much about love.
Cornelia Funke
But I won't bore you any longer on the subject of old men. It won't make things any better and all my plans of revenge (such as disconnecting the lamp, shutting the door, hiding his clothes) must be abandoned in order to keep the peace. Oh, I'm becoming so sensible! ...
Anne Frank
Think pink but don't wear it
Karl Lagerfeld
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Walter Benjamin
Scientific physiology has the task of determining the functions of the animal body and deriving them as a necessary consequence from its elementary conditions.
Carl Ludwig
The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.
Arthur Schopenhauer
For such is the noble nature of man, that his heart will never wholly lose itself in one single passion or idol, or, as people call it apologetically, one idea. On it goes from one devotion to the next, not because it is ashamed of its first love, but because it must be on fire perpetually. To fall for Reason, as our grandfathers did, is but one Fall of Man among his many passionate attempts to find the apples of knowledge and eternal life, both in one. When a nation, or individual, declines the experiences that present themselves to passionate hearts only, they are automatically turned out from the realm of history. The heart of man either falls in love with somebody or something, or it falls ill. It can never go unoccupied. And the great question for mankind Is what is to be loved or hated next, whenever an old love or fear has lost its hold.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.
Friedrich Nietzsche