Quotes by German Authors - Page 31

Secrets are powerful, and this was one of the most powerful of all.
Jennifer Rush
Secrets... nothing eats away at love faster.
Cornelia Funke
If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.
Eugen Herrigel
You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child.
Eugen Herrigel
This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.
Eugen Herrigel
Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.
Eugen Herrigel
You worry yourself unnecessarily. Put the thought of hitting right out of your mind!
Eugen Herrigel
...being able to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension...without continually asking yourself: Shall I be able to manage it? Wait patiently, as see what comes - and how it comes!
Eugen Herrigel
... the Master's warning that we should not practice anything except self-detaching immersion.
Eugen Herrigel
That's just the trouble, you make an effort to think about it. Concentrate entirely on your breathing, as if you had nothing else to do!
Master (Eugen Herrigel)
...it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept. And then you start to hurry. You work faster and faster and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop--and still the street stretches away in front of you. That's not the way to do it.You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that's how it ought to be.And all at once, before you know it, you find you've swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. what's more, you aren't out of breath. That's important, too... (28-29)
Michael Ende
I am thankful for all of those who said NO to me. It's because of them I'm doing it myself.
Albert Einstein
A gentle, warm, sweet pain spreads through my chest at those words.
Aleksandr Voinov
Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God, your functional savior.
Martin Luther
Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin. ... We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The purpose of marriage is not to have pleasure and to be idle, but to procreate and bring up children, to support a household. This, of course, is a huge burden full of great cares and toils. But you have been created by God to be a husband or a wife that you may learn to bear these troubles. Those who have no love for children are... unworthy of being called men or women; for they despise the blessing of God, the creator and author of marriage.
Martin Luther
Meeting him was a miracle. He was a precious gift sent from God from heaven above!
Lily Amis
The blessing hands of Christ are like a roof that protects us. But at the same time, they are a gesture of opening up, tearing the world open so that heaven my enter in, may become "present" within it.
Pope Benedict XVI
That's your response to everything: drink?""No, that's my response to nothing.
Charles Bukowski
I have beenhanging hereheadlessfor so longthat the body has forgottenwhyor where or when ithappenedand the toeswalk along in shoesthat do notcareand althoughthe fingersslice things andhold things andmove things andtouchthingssuch asorangesapplesonionsbooksbodiesI am no longerreasonably surewhat these thingsarethey are mostlylikelamplight andfogthen often the hands willgo to thelost headand hold the headlike the hands of achildaround a balla blockair and wood -no teethno thinking partand when a windowblows opento achurchhillwomandogor something singingthe fingers of the handare senseless to vibrationbecause they have noearssenseless to color becausethey have noeyessenseless to smellwithout a nosethey country goes by asnonsensethe continentsthe daylights and eveningsshineon my dirtyfingernailsand in some mirrormy facea block to vanishscuffed part of a child’sballwhile everywheremovesworms and aircraftfires on the landtall violets in sanctitymy hands let go let golet go
Charles Bukowski
By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.
Angelus Silesius
...his condition in Roanoke is a strong testament that lassitude, indifference and the peculiarities of his thought were primarily the consequences of his illness and not of the early attempts to treat it. The popular view that anti-psychotics were chemical straight jackets that suppressed clear thinking and voluntary activity seems not to be borne out in Nash's case.If anything, the only periods when he was relatively free of hallucinations, delusions and the erosion of will were the periods following either insulin treatment or the use of anti psychotics. In other words, rather than reducing Nash to a zombie, medication seemed to reduce zombie like behavior.
Sylvia Nasar
If then, Moses so distinctly announces that there is in us not only a faculty, but also a facility for keeping all commandments, why are we sweating so much? ... What need is there now of Christ or of Spirit? We have found a passage that asserts freedom of choice, but also distinctly teaches that the keeping of the commandments is easy.
Martin Luther
Divide and rule, the politician cries;Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Friendship is like a flower. It needs daily love and care to blossom. If you forget to give it water, the flower dies. It’s as simple as that! Teddy
Lily Amis
He's looking into the night, in case a shadow comes to listen and look.
Herta Müller
Night was fading over the fields as if the rain had washed the darkness out of the hem of its garment.
Cornelia Funke
A man who is awake in the open field at night or who wanders over silent paths experiences the world differently than by day. Nighness vanishes, and with it distance; everything is equally far and near, close by us and yet mysteriously remote. Space loses its measures. There are whispers and sounds, and we do not know where or what they are. Our feelings too are peculiarly ambiguous. There is a strangeness about what is intimate and dear, and a seductive charm about the frightening. There is no longer a distinction between the lifeless and the living, everything is animate and soulless, vigilant and asleep at once. What the day brings on and makes recognizable gradually, emerges out of the dark with no intermediary stages. The encounter suddenly confronts us, as if by a miracle: What is the thing we suddenly see - an enchanted bride, a monster, or merely a log? Everything teases the traveller, puts on a familiar face and the next moment is utterly strange, suddenly terrifies with awful gestures and immediately resumes a familiar and harmless posture.Danger lurks everywhere. Out of the dark jaws of the night which gape beside the traveller, any moment a robber may emerge without warning, or some eerie terror, or the uneasy ghost of a dead man - who knows what may once have happened at that very spot? Perhaps mischievous apparitions of the fog seek to entice him from the right path into the desert where horror dwells, where wanton witches dance their rounds which no man ever leaves alive. Who can protect him, guide him aright, give him good counsel? The spirit of Night itself, the genius of its kindliness, its enchantment, its resourcefulness, and its profound wisdom. She is indeed the mother of all mystery. The weary she wraps in slumber, delivers from care, and she causes dreams to play about their souls. Her protection is enjoyed by the un-happy and persecuted as well as by the cunning, whom her ambivalent shadows offer a thousand devices and contrivances. With her veil she also shields lovers, and her darkness keeps ward over all caresses, all charms hidden and revealed. Music is the true language of her mystery - the enchanting voice which sounds for eyes that are closed and in which heaven and earth, the near and the far, man and nature, present and past, appear to make themselves understood.But the darkness of night which so sweetly invites to slumber also bestows new vigilance and illumination upon the spirit. It makes it more perceptive, more acute, more enterprising. Knowledge flares up, or descends like a shooting star - rare, precious, even magical knowledge.And so night, which can terrify the solitary man and lead him astray, can also be his friend, his helper, his counsellor.
Walter F. Otto
Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul.
Patrick Süskind
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 horrible end is better than endless horror.
Oliver Markus
Free will? Either you follow the word of God, or you'll be punished with eternal hellfire. That's the same kind of "choice" an abuse boyfriend gives you: 'Either you do exactly what I say, or I'll beat the shit out of you.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Make that cage golden, it’s still a fucking cage.”“Wel , in the absence of other options, gold will have to do.
Aleksandr Voinov
In all things it is better to hope than to despair.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every past is worth condemning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The progress of mankind is due exclusively to the progress of natural sciences, not to morals, religion or philosophy.
Justus von Liebig
Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.
Walter Benjamin
Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual -- from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual -- whether this be animal or plant or man -- is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the "have-been" works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hybris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements"?
Oswald Spengler
War is progress, peace is stagnation
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
If America and the Western world continue in their state of unconscious hopelessness, lack of faith and of fortitude, it is predictable that they will not be able to resist the temptation of the big bang by nuclear weapons, which would end all problems - overpopulation, boredom, and hunger - since it would do away with all life.
Erich Fromm
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
Karl Marx
Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance.
Ernst F. Schumacher
In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.
Rudiger Dornbusch
Now, in the modern money economy everything in the nature of a social-economic occurrence consists in human actions and behaviour.
Oskar Morgenstern
...the facts of economic life cannot be comprehensively described in terms of statistics.
Oskar Morgenstern
Our knowledge of dynamic processes is necessarily inferior to our ability to describe stationary conditions.
Oskar Morgenstern
It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx.
Eric Hobsbawm
The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed.
Karl Marx
What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. this is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.
Karl Marx
The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.
Eric Hobsbawm
Machinery which is not used is not capital.
Karl Marx
The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a 'cruel mistress'.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
I have also fantasised myself to be his female slave, but this does not suffice, for after all every woman can be the slave of her husband.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?
Thomas Mann
I'm fairly fond of boys, but my preference is for girls; When I have enough of a girl, she serves me still as a boy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
...for she too is spending time in her life only in order to be alive.
Erpenbeck Jennie Visitation
My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.
Charles Bukowski
When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.
Karl Lagerfeld
Calm is good, passivity not to much. Calm is always a basic inner attitude that makes it possible to concentrate and act purposefully. But passivity suggest an element of denial. Passive people refuse to take initiatives and to exploit stimuli. They sit and wait - without strength, defiant or rigid from shock - in whatever their situation is and prefer to suffer considerably from their plight rather than trying to change something. This includes boredom and even bad relationships.
Sylvia Loehken