Quotes by German Authors - Page 46

There is talk of a new astrologer [Nicolaus Copernicus] who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth.[Martin Luther stating his objection to heliocentrism due to his Scripture's geocentrism]
Martin Luther
Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?[Lutheran theologian Abraham Calovius illustrating his objection to heliocentrism due to the Bible's support of geocentrism]
Abraham Calovius
ON GETTING DRUNK:"Those who are Christians are to see to it that they are grateful for grace and redemption and conduct themselves modestly, moderately, and soberly, so that one does not go on living the swinish life that goes on in the filthy world...." "...In my time it was considered a great shame among the nobility [drunkenness]. Now they are worse than the citizens and peasants;...We preach, but who stops it? Those who should stop it do it themselves; the princes even more. Therefore Germany is a land of hogs and a filthy people which debauches its body and its life. If you were going to paint it, you would have to paint a pig. "This gluttony is inundating us like an ocean....We are the laughingstock of all the other countries, who look upon us as filthy pigs;...It is possible to tolerate a little elevation, when a man takes a drink or two too much after working hard and when he is feeling low. This must be called a frolic. But to sit day and night, pouring it in and pouring it out again, is piggish. This is not a human way of living. not to say Christian, but rather a pig's life." - Martin Luther
Martin Luther
Everything bad in the Old Testament (and there's a lot) is there to point out our sin, while everything good in the Old Testament is there to point us to our Savior.
Martin Luther
I am much afraid that the universities will prove to be the great gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt.
Martin Luther
The soul can do without everything except the word of God, without which none at all of its wants are provided for.
Martin Luther
The Christian life is participation in the encounter of Christ with the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Christ want to point this out and to warn His followers that in the world everyone should live as though he were alone and should consider His Word and preaching as the very greatest thing on earth, thinking this way to himself: “I see my neighbor and the whole city, and yes the whole world, living differently. All those who are great or noble or rich, the princes and the lords, are allied with it. Nevertheless I have an ally who is greater than all of them, namely, Christ and His Word. When I am all alone, therefore, I am still not alone. Because I have the Word of God, I have Christ with me, together with all the dear angels and all the saints since the beginning of the world. Actually there is a bigger crowd and a more glorious procession surrounding me than there could be in the whole world now. Only I cannot see it with my eyes, and I have to watch and bear the offense of having so many people forsake me or live and act in opposition to me.
Martin Luther
The silence leans forward.
Saša Stanišić
The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.
Karl Rahner
The constant talker will never, or a least rarely, grasp truth. Of course even he must experience some truths, otherwise he could not exist. He does notice certain facts, observe certain relations, draw conclusions and make plans. But he does not yet possess genuine truth, which comes into being only when the essence of an object, the significance of a relaton, and what is valid and eternal in this world reveal themselves. This requires the spacousness, freedom, and pure receptiveness of that inner “clean-swept room” whilch silence alone can create
Romano Guardini
Silence is also a form of speaking.
Herta Müller
Silence is also a form of speaking. They’re exactly alike. It’s a basic component of language. We’re always selecting what we say and what we don’t. Why do we say one thing and not the other? And we do this instinctively, too, because no matter what we’re talking about, there’s more that doesn’t get said than does. And this isn’t always to hide things—it’s simply part of an instinctive selection in our speech. This selection varies from one person to the next, so that no matter how many people describe the same thing, the descriptions are different, the point of view is different. And even if there is a similar viewpoint, people make different choices as to what is said or not said. This was very clear to me, coming from the village, since the people there never said more than they absolutely needed to. When I was fifteen and went to the city, I was amazed at how much people talked and how much of that talk was pointless. And how much people talked about themselves—that was totally alien to me.For me, silence had always been another form of communication. After all, you can tell so much just by looking at a person. At home we always knew about each other even if we didn’t talk about ourselves all the time. I encountered a lot of silence elsewhere as well. There was the silence that was self-imposed, because you could never say what you really thought.
Herta Müller
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
Jean Arp
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.
Eckhart Tolle
I went to the kitchen and felt-up the turkey.
Charles Bukowski
Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes - they'd sooner eat the same things all the time - but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes.
Walter Moers
The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me.- Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp
Albert Einstein
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
Thomas Mann
The Jews are the scum of the earth, but they are also great masters in lying.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
the lies of centuries, the lies of love,the lies of Socrates and Blake and Christwill be your bedmates and tombstonesin a death that will never end.
Charles Bukowski
This workshop where ideals are manufactured--it seems to me it stinks of so many lies
Friedrich Nietzsche
Relationships based on dishonesty, lies,Secrets and cheats R not only predictedto fail but also a waste of precious timeand energie! U can’t fool yourself 4ever!
Lily Amis
And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.
Hannah Arendt
A tiny company, ‘the aware’, we have taken up civilization’s fiercest weapons to fight against the dark army of the masses whose leaders are hunger and stupidity. These weapons are the smile and the lie.
Iwan Goll
Lying is not a sin, since there has never been a law-maker or philosopher who could determine what truth is. I lie for the fun of it. I lie for the fear of the gravity of life. I lie out of boredom. How can anyone who has more fantasy than the Catholic evening paper get by without lying?
Iwan Goll
why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?
Bernhard Schlink
I prefer to make up my own quotes and attribute them to very smart people, so that I can use them to win arguments
Albert Einstein
People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after a hunt.
Otto von Bismarck
If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.
Adolf Hitler
The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I think . . . you should have children, John." At least he's no longer talking about bugs."I'm too young, Dad.""It's the most important thing . . . I've done in . . . my life.
Ursula Hegi
The love, loyalty, and dedication of Mary and Joseph are an example for all Christian couples, who are neither the friends nor masters of their children’s lives, but the guardians of this incomparable gift from God.
Pope Benedict XVI
Siddhartha began to understand that it was not happiness and peace that had come to him with his son but, rather, sorrow and worry. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and worry of love to the happiness and peace he had known without the boy.
Hermann Hesse
One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has a custom them to obedience and experience has made them cautious in conversation with their teachers.
Catherine the Great
...having a child is like casting off your own childhood forever. It's as if it's only then that you really grasp what it means to be a man. You're scared too that all your weaknesses will be laid bare, because fatherhood demands more than you can give.... I always felt I had to earn your love, because I loved you so, so much.
Nina George
There are many different ways of approaching parenting as there are cultures. However, in non-industrialized cultures, the similarities are also striking. Extended nursing, co-sleeping, carrying the baby in close physical contact, responding promptly to cries or distress, never leaving a baby alone, are all virtually universal in traditional societies that have not become overly "westernized".
Ingrid Bauer
If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests.
Baron D. Holbach
Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.
Peter Sloterdijk
It is, however, a most astonishing but incontestable fact, that the history of the evolution of man as yet constitutes no part of general education. Indeed, our so-called 'educated classes' are to this day in total ignorance of the most important circumstances and the most remarkable phenomena which Anthropogeny has brought to light.
Ernst Haeckel
Ignorance never yet helped anybody.
Karl Marx
When one considers how vast and how close to us is the problem of existence—this equivocal, tortured, fleeting, dream-like existence of ours—so vast and so close that a man no sooner discovers it than it overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when one sees how all men, with few and rare exceptions, have no clear consciousness of the problem, nay, seem to be quite unaware of its presence, but busy themselves with everything rather than with this, and live on, taking no thought but for the passing day and the hardly longer span of their own personal future, either expressly discarding the problem or else over-ready to come to terms with it by adopting some system of popular metaphysics and letting it satisfy them; when, I say, one takes all this to heart, one may come to the opinion that man may be said to be a thinking being only in a very remote sense, and henceforth feel no special surprise at any trait of human thoughtlessness or folly; but know, rather, that the normal man’s intellectual range of vision does indeed extend beyond that of the brute, whose whole existence is, as it were, a continual present, with no consciousness of the past or the future, but not such an immeasurable distance as is generally supposed.
Schopenhauer
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Erich Fromm
-Nobody can force you to smile, she says. -What? I ask. But I know she's not even talking to me, only to herself, as if she's the last person left in the room. -They can make you show your teeth, but what good is that? Nobody can make you smile against your will.
Hugo Hamilton
Lies can't grow. Once plucked they can only wither. But every truth, once planted, grows into a tall, noble tree. 
Stefan Emunds
Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing the pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.
Hermann Hesse
Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing to pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.
Hermann Hesse
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
Albert Einstein
Nothing is more intolerable than to have admit to yourself your own errors.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters
Albert Einstein
But what is great can only begin great.
Martin Heidegger
Emil Fischer represents a symbol of Germany's greatness.
Carl Dietrich Harries
The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness
Pope Benedict XVI
You are treading your path of greatness: now it must call up all your courage that there is no longer a path behind you!You are treading your path of greatness: no one shall steal after you here! Your foot itself has extinguished the path behind you, and above that path stands written: Impossibility.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sometimes the most beautiful things are in front of our eyes, and we don’t even notice because we’re either too busy or too afraid to take a closer look.
Katja Michael