Quotes by German Authors - Page 3

Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
Eckhart Tolle
In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.
Ernst Jentsch
You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.
Hermann Hesse
Ships are my arrows, the sea my bow, the world my target.
Robert Thier
Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best
Otto von Bismarck
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
Thomas Mann
A marijuana high can enhance core human mental abilities. It can help you to focus, to remember, to see new patterns, to imagine, to be creative, to introspect, to empathically understand others, and to come to deep insights. If you don’t find this amazing you have lost your sense of wonder. Which, by the way, is something a high can bring back, too.
Sebastian Marincolo
He had his eyes closed androcked himself so much that everyone thought he wouldsoon crash to the ground. And then it happened. Hecrashed to the ground. Surprised, he lay on the groundon his side, not sure what had happened, looking around.Next he jumped up and listened to Matica’s singing again,starting to rock himself once more. His eyes closed slowly,his beak opened. And then he crashed to the ground a secondtime. This time he kept lying down, spreading his freewing up into the air and waving it to the tune of the melody.Strange sounds came out of his beak. It was a gruntbut more than a grunt, as if he was really enjoying himself,as if he would follow Matica’s words and would singor hum as well.
Gigi Sedlmayer
You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise.
Michael Ende
Look at the huge success of Fifty Shades of Grey. The girl in the book lets a rich guy beat her and ritually rape her, and she likes it! She finds it erotic! But imagine if Christian Grey wasn't a billionaire. Imagine if he lived in a dirty old trailer down by the river. Then that story wouldn't be a sexy romance novel, but an episode of CSI.
Oliver Markus
Self-publishing a shitty book doesn't make you an author any more than singing in the shower makes you a rockstar or squeezing your pimple makes you a dermatologist.
Oliver Markus
The light is all around, but to find it, we need to look inside our hearts. We can go through life and search in all the wrong places. But one day we’ll look within and we’ll find the entire universe.
Dorit Brauer
Ya got cigarettes?” she asks. “Yes,” I say,“I got cigarettes.” “Matches?” she asks.“Enough to burn Rome.” “Whiskey?”“Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River of pain.” “You drunk?” “Not yet.
Charles Bukowski
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.
Eckhart Tolle
You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I like to reinvent myself — it’s part of my job.
Karl Lagerfeld
We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature's determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind--which they loved as much as we did--was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren't written down anywhere.
Hermann Hesse
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.
Friedrich Engels
Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
Karl Marx
The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
Friedrich Schlegel
Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.
Ernst Jünger
Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
Hannah Arendt
But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.
Erwin Panofsky
Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.
Erwin Panofsky
Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art.
Robert Schumann
What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The world is not divided between Christ and the devil; it is completely the world of Christ, whether it recognizes this or not. As this reality in Christ it is to be addressed, and thus the false reality that it imagines itself to have, in itself or in the devil, is to be destroyed. The dark, evil world may not be surrendered to the devil, but must be claimed for the one who won it by coming in the flesh, by the death and resurrection of Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Honestly, I never really understood the glorification of Fridays & weekends. I don't want to build a life and career, where I spent five days a week waiting for the weekend. No! I want to enjoy my life, and don't wish any weekday away. I want each day to matter to me, in some way, even if it's a small tiny way. I love my life. Everyday. That's the spirit we should convey all around us.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
And yonder sits a maiden, The fairest of the fair, With gold in her garment glittering, And she combs her golden hair.
Heinrich Heine
Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust. And if a guy is paying attention to you, he wants to have sex with you.
Oliver Markus
There are only 24 hours in a day. The average man has to sleep about 8 hours. And work for 8 hours. That leaves 8 hours to run some errands, drive to and from work, eat, and have some spare time. And in that little bit of spare time, a man has to figure out how to get the one thing he likes more than anything else: sex.So when a man has to choose whether or not he will hang out with a female and spend any time, money or attention on her, the question of whether the resources he spent will result in sex plays a very big factor. If your male "friend" chooses to spend his time and money on you, it's because he thinks there is a chance it might pay off in sex at some point. If he hangs out with you instead of with some other female, it's because he thinks you are his best bet to getting sex.The more likely there will be sex, the more willing he is to spend his little bit of free time with you. If he thinks his chances of having sex are higher with a different female, he will spent more time, money and attention on her. That's just common sense, and using his limited resources wisely.
Oliver Markus
We want to look desirable. We want others to want to mate with us. No different than a colorful peacock. When girls dress up for their night out at the club, they are doing what all animals do when they try to make themselves desirable for a potential mate. That's the whole point behind the fashion, perfume, cosmetics, diet, and plastic surgery industries.
Oliver Markus
When guys try to get a good job and make a lot of money, it's so that they can find a good mate, because they know women like guys with money. Big tits are to men, what big wallets are to women. A sexy woman can have almost any man she wants. And a rich guy can have almost any woman he wants.
Oliver Markus
Men know that most women want to have an emotional connection with someone before they sleep with them. Men know that a lot of women think it's romantic to be friends first, and then the friendship blossoms into a relationship. Men know that they have to jump through all these hoops first, before they can get laid. And that's really all romance and courtship is to a man: hoops he has to jump through to get laid.
Oliver Markus
I never touch sugar, cheese, bread... I only like what I'm allowed to like. I'm beyond temptation. There is no weakness. When I see tons of food in the studio, for us and for everybody, for me it's as if this stuff was made out of plastic. The idea doesn't even enter my mind that a human being could put that into their mouth. I'm like the animals in the forest. They don't touch what they cannot eat.
Karl Lagerfeld
Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers, the "National Security Managers", as they have been recently called by Richard Barnet, who "exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and interpreting the outside world for him".
Hannah Arendt
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.Workingmen of all countries unite!
Karl Marx
The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The anarch differs from the anarchist in that he has a very pronounced sense of the rules. Insofar as and to the extent that he observes them, he feels exempt from thinking.This is consistent with normal behavior: everyone who boards a train rolls over bridges and through tunnels that engineers have devised for him and on which a hundred thousand hands have labored. This does not darken the passenger’s mood; settling in comfortably, he buries himself in his newspaper, has breakfast, or thinks about his business. Likewise, the anarch – except that he always remains aware of that relationship, never losing sight of his main theme, freedom, that which also flies outside, past hill and dale. He can get away at any time, not just from the train, but also from any demand made on him by state, society, or church, and also from existence.
Ernst Jünger
Chains of gold are still chains.
Robert Thier
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Herbert Marcuse
The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won't function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless scream.s. We have no flesh, no muscle now
Erich Maria Remarque
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
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.
Erich Maria Remarque
Ti­tles are granted or in­her­ited, no­bil­ity isn't. Whatever paper we receive, be it of material or immaterial value – it will never exceed the value of your character being loved by people!
Akilnathan Logeswaran
When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Enlightenment arrives like a thief in the middle of the dark night of the soul.
Stefan Emunds
There’s a way to live like a god.
Stefan Emunds
The soul is imbued with a yearning that is carried, like a torch, from incarnation to incarnation. It burns with a curiosity about life and it’s true identity. Souls live, strive, and evolve, driven to seeking the truth about the world and themselves.
Stefan Emunds
Spirituality is the realization of the totality of our being.
Stefan Emunds
The universe is a gigantic amusement park in which we can have a ride or two.
Stefan Emunds
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
… there are no arbitrary constants ... nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory).
Albert Einstein
Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought”, “a priori givens”, etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.
Albert Einstein
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Approaching the forest from the west was no army, but a delegation of Grailsundanian master surgeons on their way to an appendix conference . . . But that isn't the craziest part of the story - oh, no, my boy, for approaching from the east was a party of itinerant watchmakers bound for the pocket-watch fair at Wimbleton . . . But not even that is the craziest part of the story! For apporaching from the south were over a hundred armourers and locksmiths on their way to Florinth, where some power-hungry prince had commissioned them to build a monstrous war machine . . . Well, that would be enough crazy coincedences for an averagely crazy story but the battle of Nurn Forest involved the most improbable coincedences in the history of Zamonia. For entering the forest, this time from the north came a delegation of alchemists.
Walter Moers
One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said--why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.
Burkhard Bilger
Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
Erich Fromm
Being faithful and monogamous is not natural for human beings. It takes work. Deep down we all know that. We have all been tempted to stray at some point or another. Even when it was only a fleeting thought and we didn't act on it. Every time we acknowledge that someone of the opposite sex is "attractive" or "sexy" we are doing nothing other than pointing out that they would be a suitable mate. Not acting on that natural impulse to want to mate with a viable mating partner requires a conscious decision. It's a constant struggle between what your body wants, and what the civilized part of your brain says you should do, in order to avoid the negative consequences of cheating on your spouse and ruining your long-term relationship. That's why affairs, and extra-marital sex, are often referred to as "a moment of weakness.
Oliver Markus