Quotes by German Authors - Page 42

St. Augustine says something which is a great thought and a great comfort here. He interprets the passage from the Psalms ‘seek his face always’ as saying: this applies ‘for ever’; to all eternity. God is so great that we never finish our searching. He is always new. With God there is perpetual, unending encounter, with new discoveries and new joy. Such things are theological matters. At the same time, in an entirely human perspective, I look forward to being reunited with my parents, my siblings, my friends, and I imagine it will be as lovely as it was at our family home.
Peter Seewald
I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth... What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche
animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. neither do I. maybe that's why we get along
Charles Bukowski
Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.
Friedrich Nietzsche
‎"We shouldn't wait to be happy until we reach some future point, only to discover that happiness was already available--all the time!
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
The happiest people are not the ones with the best or the most things, but those who most appreciate what they have.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Happiness is a choice, a repetitive one.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
The morning was a wretched time of day for him. He feared it and it never brought him any good. On no morning of his life had he ever been in good spirits nor done any good before midday, nor ever had a happy idea, nor devised any pleasure for himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive active and sometimes, aglow with joy.
Hermann Hesse
I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.
Cornelia Funke
as a childi supposei was not quitenormal.my happiest times werewheni was left alone inthe house on asaturday.
Charles Bukowski
The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity.
Paul Tillich
I am superior to you only in one point: I'm awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.
Hermann Hesse
Each one's no longer consciousOf the high wall, or the rest:Since the one enduring fortress,Is the soldier's iron breast.If you’d live unconquered,Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:Every wife an Amazon bred,And every child a hero.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wife, to him, was someone who stood for stability, forcoming home, for dealing with all the shit he wasn’t able to deal with. For providing a real life and not this insanity.
Aleksandr Voinov
If there is anything that can bind the mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living,—then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.
Johannes Kepler
940Home is not where you live but where they understand you.
Christian Morgenstern
The world turns gray, the air grows cool, the fog blows in. Only at evening can you really value home.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.
Hermann Hesse
A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing.
Jenny Erpenbeck
Home. When it rains, you can smell the leaves in the forest and the sand. It's all so small and mild, the landscape surrounding the lake, so manageable. The leaves and the sand are so close, it's as if you might, if you wanted, pull them on over your head. And the lake always laps at the shore so gently, licking the hand you dip into it like a young dog, and the water is soft and shallow.
Jenny Erpenbeck
‎What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and work flow.
Martin Luther
One never reaches home,' she said. 'But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.
Hermann Hesse
Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbartThe human power is revealed by poetIl potere dell'umanità si rivela nel poeta
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.
Karl Jaspers
Be noble minded! Our own heart, and not other men's opinions of us, forms our true honor.
Friedrich Schiller
Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It was both odd and unjust, a real example of pitiful arbitrariness of existance, that you were born into a particular time & held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.
Daniel Kehlmann
Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.
Hermann Hesse
Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
Bertolt Brecht
Life is a constant process of dying.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The person who fights monsters should make sure that in the process, he does not become a monster himself. Because when you stare down at an abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The solitary speaks."One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.
Karl Marx
Actually, it's nature itself that creates the most beautiful pictures, I'm only choosing the perspective.
Katja Michael
It is impossible to describe a landscape so validly as to exclude all other descriptions, for no one can see the landscape in all its aspects at the same time, and no single view can prevent the existence and validity of other equally possible views.
Frithjof Schuon
Political judgment is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.
Otto von Bismarck
Imagine a wall that's green on one side and red on the other. You stand on one side and only see green. I stand on the other side and only see red. We'll both be right about the color we see, even though we disagree on what color the wall is. Being able to realize that the other person has a valid point, even if you disagree with it, that's maturity.
Oliver Gaspirtz
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position - a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, as so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.
Eckhart Tolle
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You understand, we just don't fuck with truth.
Charles Bukowski
Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging.
Ernst Cassirer
By reflecting a little on this subject I am almost convinced that those numberless small Circuses we see on the moon are the works of the Lunarians and may be called their Towns.
William Herschel
Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.
Henry Kissinger
Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.
Albert Schweitzer
I envied Lesley her unshakable optimism. She always looked on the bright side of things. If they Had a bright side.
Kerstin Gier
optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Even when I was caught in the web, I didn't give up hope. And as you see, I was right.
Michael Ende
I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.
Herbert Rosendorfer
What are stories for if we don't learn from them?
Cornelia Funke
Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page any more than they begin on the first page
Cornelia Funke
All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Good stories are like those noble wild animals that make their home in hidden spots, and you must often settle down at the entrance of the caves and woods and lie in wait for them a long time.
Hermann Hesse
In the Christian community thankfulness is just what it is anywhere else in the Christian life. Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good. Then we deplore the fact that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experience that God has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.
Albert Einstein
When the gratitude that many owe to one discards all modesty, then there is fame.
Friedrich Nietzsche