Quotes by German Authors - Page 49

For awakened human beings, there was no obligation—none, none, none at all—except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led.
Hermann Hesse
With the compelling convincingness of dreams, which are vague yet exact, the ghost voice draws us (to ourselves and all of our component selves), lifts them casually out of the well of the past--the well wherein nothing is lost, the deep well of forgetfulness, and remembrance--and tosses them mockingly on the glassy table surface of our consciousness. There we are forced to consider them. There we are forced to regard, analyze, and re-understand.
Heinrich Robert Zimmer
But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual, the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
Hermann Hesse
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
Theodor W. Adorno
A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
Meister Eckhart
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
Eckhart Tolle
The more we do to you,the less you seem to believe we are doing it.
Joseph mengele
Despite everything, I believe people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank
Down there the nights are bright and nobody believes in the Devil.
Cornelia Funke
But I comforted myself with the thought that the reward for every discomfort I suffered for God was a spiritual blessing.
Kristiane Backer
I didn't know if I was unhappy. I felt too miserable to be unhappy.
Charles Bukowski
Jolly felt salty tears on her lips, and for the first time in her life it occurred to her that sorrow tasted exactly like the sea.
Kai Meyer
Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the white peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.
Franz Rosenzweig
Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.
Victor Klemperer
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.
Heinrich Heine
...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.
Peter Sloterdijk
If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.
Friedrich Hebbel
In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.
Peter Sloterdijk
Nick demonstrated twenty-three ways of communicating without words by fanning himself with a napkin. "This one means oops, your fly is open, sir, and if you lower the fan a little and look at someone over the top of it, it means wow, I'd like to marry you. But if you do it the other way around, it means ha ha, we are now at war with Spain.
Kerstin Gier
Man acts as though he were the sharper and the master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
Heidegger
The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that's caught a cold.
Herta Müller
Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
I am despised by an army of undiscerning academic highbrows, and ridiculed by semi-educated and vengeful "China-experts" whose era of translating Chinese into Western categories has now come to an end. The public is ready for non-European vocabularies.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
The wisdom of the East is immortalized in its vocabularies and must be liberated from European language imperialism once and for all.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
Languages are not strangers to on another.
Walter Benjamin
Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.
Karl Marx
Every word is a prejudice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Now, we see what we are shown. We have gotten used to being shown no matter what, within or beyond the limited range of human sight. This habituation to the monopoly of visualization-on-command strongly suggests that only those things that can in some way be visualized, recorded, and replayed at will are part of reality...The result is a strange mistrusts of our own eyes, a disposition to take as real only that which is mechanically displayed in a photograph, a statistical curve, or a table. Eyewitness testimony must be "substantiated" by records that have been acquired, and can be stored and then shown.
Barbara Duden
Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.
Rudolf Carnap
The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.
William Herschel
As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics.
Otto Hahn
For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?
Richard Courant
The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.
Erich Fromm
It is good," he thought, "to get a taste of everything for oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have experienced only now. And now I know it, don't just know it in my memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me, to know this!
Hermann Hesse
It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)
Hermann Hesse
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
Walter Benjamin
Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.
Karl Rahner
A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Eckhart Tolle
...talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.
Patrick Süskind
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle
The Wolf trots to and fro,The world lies deep in snow,The raven from the birch tree flies,But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe,The roe -she is so dear, so sweet -If such a thing I might surpriseIn my embrace, my teeth would meet,What else is there beneath the skies?The lovely creature I would so treasure,And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,I would drink of her red blood full measure,Then howl till the night went by.Even a hare I would not despise;Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.Is everything to be deniedThat could make life a little bright?The hair on my brush is getting grey.The sight is failing from my eyes.Years ago my dear mate died.And now I trot and dream of a roe.I trot and dream of a hare.I hear the wind of midnight howl.I cool with the snow my burning jowl,And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.
Hermann Hesse
There is a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out.
Charles Bukowski
wesat theresmokingcigarettesat5in the morning.
Charles Bukowski
I found the best thingI could dowas just to type awayat my own workand let the dyingdieas they always have.
Charles Bukowski
one doesn't even think ofthe liverand if the liverdoesn't think ofus, that'sfine.
Charles Bukowski
when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity ofmy city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked theheartaway.
Charles Bukowski
I didn't know who tobelievebutone thing I doknow: when a man islivingmany claim relationshipsthat are hardlysoand after he dies, well,then it's everybody'sparty.
Charles Bukowski
and love is a word usedtoo much andmuchtoo soon.
Charles Bukowski
The dead do not needaspirin orsorrow,I suppose.but they might needrain.not shoesbut a place towalk.not cigarettes,they tell us,but a place to burn.or we're told:space and a place to flymight be thesame.the dead don't need me.nor do theliving.but the dead might needeachother.in fact, the dead might needeverything weneedandwe need so muchif we only knewwhat itwas.it isprobablyeverythingand we will allprobably dietrying to getitor diebecause wedon't getit.I hopeyou will understandwhen I am deadI got as muchaspossible.
Charles Bukowski
regret is mostly caused by not havingdone anything.
Charles Bukowski
sometimes it's hard to knowwhat todo.
Charles Bukowski
when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric”I know what hemeantI know what hewanted:to be completely alive every momentin spite of the inevitable.we can’t cheat death but we can make itwork so hardthat when it does takeusit will have known a victory just asperfect asours
Charles Bukowski
beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone
Charles Bukowski
If perfection is absurd, why is tragedy common?
John Most
beware women grownoldwho were neveranything butyoung
Charles Bukowski
I always felt it wouldpass.I listened to the charges against meknowing some of them to be truebut certainly notimportant enoughto become the target ofviolence, envy,vengeance.I thought it would surelypass.
Charles Bukowski