Quotes by German Authors - Page 47

as the shadows assumeshapesI fight the slowretreatnowmy once-promisedwindlingdwindlingnowlighting new cigarettespouring moredrinksit has been a beautifulfightstillis.
Charles Bukowski
Because she was so beautiful the huntsman took pity on her, and he said, "Run away, you poor child.
Wilhelm Grimm
His blue-green eyes were dark pools of immeasurable depth, pools you could drown yourself in and never again come up for air.
Robert Thier
While progressing in this way, with a dirty street ahead of him and a clean one behind, he often had grand ideas. They were ideas that couldn't easily be put into words, though - ideas as hard to define as a half-remembered scent or a colour seen in a dream.
Michael Ende
For it cannot be denied that all over the world and in all ages there are beings who are perceived to be extraordinary, charming, and appealing, and whom many honor as benevolent spirits, because they make one think of a more beautiful, a freer, a more winged life than the one we lead.
Hermann Hesse
We are noble, good, beautiful, and happy!
Friedrich Nietzsche
if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment… (…) Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss… What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under…
Friedrich Nietzsche
True human progress is based less on the inventive mind than on the conscience of such men as Brandeis.~ Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.
Albert Einstein
One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie.
Karl Marx
Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself; he has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future. This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.
Erich Fromm
Ah, brothers, this God which I created was human work and human madness, like all gods!He was human, and only a poor piece of man and Ego: this phantom came to me from my own fire and ashes, that is the truth! It did not come from the ‘beyond’!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
Hermann Hesse
Masks. - There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul - and goes on seeking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.
Albert Einstein
Anyone who suffers from anxiety or depression should remember that an unhappy gut can be the cause of an unhappy mind. Sometimes, the gut has a perfect right to be unhappy, if it is dealing with an undetected food intolerance, for example. We should not always blame depression on the brain or on our life circumstances - there is much more to us than that.
Giulia Enders
Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness.
Christa Wolf
It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death.
Bernhard Schlink
If we were scars, our memories would be the stitches holding us together. You couldn't cut them apart, and if you did, it would tear you in two.""But my memories hurt," she said. "I want to forget. There's so much I just want to forget.""How are you going to do that ? Everything that's happened to you is still happening today. Once something has begun, it doesn't end. There, in your head, it never ends.
Kai Meyer
A miracle is never perfect when it happens, there are always little disappointments. But once it’s gone for good and nothing can change it, memory could make it perfect and then it would never change. If I can just call it to life now, won’t it always stay the same? Won’t it stay with me as long as I live?
Erich Maria Remarque
I think of you when upon the sea the sun flings her beams. I think of you when the moonlight shines in silvery streams. I see you when upon the distant hills the dust awakes; At night when on a fragile bridge the traveler quakes.I hear you when the blows rise on high, with murmur deep. To tread the silent grove where wander I, When all's asleep.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I think of you when upon the sea the sun flings her beams.I think of you when the moonlight shines in silvery streams.I see you when upon the distant hills the dust awakes;At night when on a fragile bridge the traveler quakes.I hear you when the billows rise on high,With murmur deep.To tread the silent grove where wander I,When all's asleep.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
They waited awhile before lighting the candles; the gloom allowed the past to slip cozily into the present. But the memories were of a time that was gone and didn't overshadow the present. But the memories were vivid, and they made the freinds feel both young and old...When Chrsitanne finally lit the candles and they saw one another clearly again, she was happy to see in the old faces of the others the young faces they had come across in their memories. we store our youth wihtin us, we can go back to it and find ourselves in it, but it is past--melancholy filled their hearsts, and sympahty, for one another and for themsleves.
Bernhard Schlink
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.
W.G. Sebald
Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.
Hermann Hesse
The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.
Novalis
Man has his being in truth--if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying--but of acting against one's conviction.
Novalis
Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Ernst Boris Chain
Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in thyself.
Felix Adler
Whatever they may think and say about their "egoism", the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those good things, withdraw from them the applause of the populace and discourage the spread of them, make them once more the concealed chastities of solitary souls, and say: morality is something forbidden! Perhaps you will thus attract to your cause the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the heroic. But then there must be something formidable in it, and not as hitherto something disgusting!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Marx hated weakness in men, and considered the making of moral judgements as the last resort of the weak. To say 'That is morally wrong' is implicitly to say ' I am powerless to stop that, so I will inveigh against it'.
Paul Robert Wolff
Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The devil is the most stubborn verisimilitude on earth!
Stefan Emunds
This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God.
Paul Tillich
God, who in the beginning was the creator, appears in the end as revenger and rewarder. Deference to such a God admittedly can produce virtuous actions; however, because fear of punishment or hope for reward are their motive, these actions will not be purely moral; on the contrary, the inner essence of such virtue will amount to prudent and carefully calculating egoism.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Morality is not man's prison but rather the divine element in him.
Pope Benedict XVI
Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[Anything which] is a living thing and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled. This was in the winter of 1876–7; the thoughts themselves go back further. They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays – let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect! The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands. And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree – all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun. – Do you like the taste of our fruit? – But of what concern is that to the trees? And of what concern is it to us philosophers? . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche
All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life – and being successful.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Morality is all right, but what about dividends?
Kaiser Wilhelm II
At this point, I can no longer avoid setting out, in an initial, provisional statement, my own hypothesis about the origin of “bad conscience.” It is not easy to get people to attend to it, and it requires them to consider it at length, to guard it, and to sleep on it. I consider bad conscience the profound illness which human beings had to come down with, under the pressure of the most fundamental of all the changes which they experienced—that change when they finally found themselves locked within the confines of society and peace. Just like the things water animals must have gone though when they were forced either to become land animals or to die off, so events must have played themselves out with this half-beast so happily adapted to the wilderness, war, wandering around, adventure—suddenly all its instincts were devalued and “disengaged.”From this point on, these animals were to go on foot and “carry themselves”; whereas previously they had been supported by the water. A terrible heaviness weighed them down. In performing the simplest things they felt ungainly. In dealing with this new unknown world, they no longer had their old leader, the ruling unconscious drives which guided them safely. These unfortunate creatures were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, bringing together cause and effect, reduced to their “consciousness,” their most impoverished and error-prone organ! I believe that on earth there has never been such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort—while at the same time those old instincts had not all at once stopped imposing their demands! Only it was difficult and seldom possible to do their bidding. For the most part, they had to find new and, as it were, underground satisfactions for them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There may not be a hell, but those who judge may create one. I think people are over-taught. They are over-taught everything. You have to find out by what happens to you, how you will react. I’ll have to use a strange term here… “good.” I don’t know where it comes from, but I feel that there’s an ultimate strain of goodness born in each of us. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in this “goodness” like a tube running through our bodies. It can be nurtured. It’s always magic, when on a freeway packed with traffic, a stranger makes room for you to change lanes… it gives you hope.
Charles Bukowski
Morality negates life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I deny morality as I deny alchemy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena
Friedrich Nietzsche
Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?
Bernhard Schlink
Sex: In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.
Marlene Dietrich
A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.
Friedrich Nietzsche
hate contains truth. beauty is a facade.
Charles Bukowski