Quotes by German Authors - Page 57

When you change, everything around you changes. That’s magic!
Kerstin Gier
Vibe high and the magic around you will unfold.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
I'm only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words-- I can't do that. That's a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, 'An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician-- but a magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.
Cornelia Funke
Prognoses which have been made contend that our technology will terminate in pure necromancy. If so, everything we now experience would be only a departure and mechanics would become refined to a degree that would no longer require any crude embodiment. Lights, words, yes even thoughts would be sufficient. (1957)
Ernst Jünger
If a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star or some equally unattainable object, it wouldn't succeed. Only, it wouldn't even try in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it, what it needs, what is indispensable to its life... if I imagined that I wanted under all circumstances to get to the North Pole, then to achieve it I would have to desire it strongly enough that my whole being was ruled by it. But if I were to decide to will that the pastor should stop wearing his glasses, it would be useless. That would be making a game of it.
Hermann Hesse
Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events
Albert Einstein
...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.
Saša Stanišić
The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.
Walter Benjamin
Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.
Günter Grass
...and Věra said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it's all white, how do the squirrels know where they've buried their hoard?... Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what it is we find in the end?
W.G. Sebald
the invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory.
Erich Maria Remarque
These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow-- a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires-- but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it.And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not.
Erich Maria Remarque
... Without memory how will you ever find your way back to where you came from?
Michael Ende
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.
W.G. Sebald
Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.
W.G. Sebald
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.
Herbert Marcuse
What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.
Walter Benjamin
The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.
Walter Benjamin
The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
Erich Maria Remarque
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
Friedrich Nietzsche
That night, Gregory dreamt of his mother. It was a dream that he'd have carried to his therapist like a raw, precious egg if he'd had a therapist, and the dream made him wish he had one. In the dream, he sat in the kitchen of his mother's house at the table on his usual place. He could hear her handle pots and pans and sigh occasionally. Sitting there filled his heart with sadness and also with a long missed feeling of comfort until he realised that the chair and the table were much too small for him: it was a child's chair and he could barely fit his long legs under the table. He was worried that his mother might scold him for being so large and for not wearing pants. Gregory, in the dream, felt his manhood press against his belly while he was crouching uncomfortably, not daring to move.
Marcus Speh
She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?
Cornelia Funke
When a human awakens to a great dream and throws the full force of his soul over it, all the universe conspires in your favor.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Now it's serious. At last it's becoming serious. So I've grown older. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely neither when I was alone, nor with others. But I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means I'm finally whole. Now I can say it as tonight, I'm at last alone. I must put an end to coincidence. The new moon of decision. I don't know if there's destiny but there's a decision. Decide! We are now the times. Not only the whole town - the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We're representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream. We are deciding everyone's game. I am ready. Now it's your turn. You hold the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me. There's no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants... invisible... transposable... a story of new ancestors. Look. My eyes. They are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone in the place. Last night I dreamt of a stranger... of my man. Only with him could I be alone, open up to him, wholly open, wholly for him. Welcome him wholly into me. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know... it's you.
Wim Wenders
I was on the far side of the dream.
Reinhardt Jung
Sleep knocks on my eyes: they grow heavy. Sleep touches my mouth: it stays open.Truly, he comes to me on soft soles, the dearest of thieves, and steals my thoughts from me
Friedrich Nietzsche
You can deceive yourself with truth too. That's an even more dangerous dream.
Erich Maria Remarque
It is for this reason that we find that co-existence, which could neither be intime alone, for time has no contiguity, nor in space alone, forspace has no before, after, or now,
Arthur Schopenhauer
Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.
Franz Marc
Wednesday. March 16 Isn't it strange that it hasn't occurred to me to put my relationship with Clarimonda on a more serious basis than these endless games. Last night, I thought about this...I can, of course, put on my hat and coat, walk down two flights of stairs, take five steps across the street and mount two flights to her door which is marked with a small sign that says "Clarimonda." Clarimonda what? I don't know. Something. Then I can knock and...Up to this point I imagine everything very clearly, but I cannot see what should happen next. I know that the door opens. But then I stand before it, looking into a dark void. Clarimonda doesn't come. Nothing comes. Nothing is there, only the black, impenetrable dark."The Spider
Hanns Heinz Ewers
There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dreams, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place by E. B. White
Bernd Heinrich
If it isn't urgent, worry about it later
Albert Einstein
A great mystery lies in the repetition and continuity of the renewal of that which is past. Culture perpetuates itself in memory and the big job is the reawakening of memory.
Hans-George Gadamer
For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment — that’s where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live — that if we managed to give up false judgments, it would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life. To concede the fictional nature of the conditions of life means, of course, taking a dangerous stand against the customary feelings about value. A philosophy which dares to do that is for this reason alone already standing beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The nation... doesn’t simply need what we have. It needs what we are.
Edith Stein: Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
How true Daddy's words were when he said: all children must look after their own upbringing. Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
Anne Frank
The reason for my starting a diary is that I have no real friend.
Anne Frank
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
Albert Einstein
Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.
Werner Herzog
No company has a culture, every company is a culture
Peter Thiel
Business is win-win, everything else shades into crime.
Stefan Emunds
Whilst I could not think of any man whose spirit was, or needed to be, more enlarged than the spirit of a genuine merchant. What a thing it is to see the order which prevails throughout his business! By means of this he can at any time survey the general whole, without needing to perplex himself in the details. What advantages does he derive from the system of book-keeping by double entry? It is among the finest inventions of the human mind; every prudent master of a house should introduce it into his economy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized', the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.
Max Weber
Hey, Hank, I notice all the women around your place lately ... good looking stuff; you're doing all right.""Sam," I say, "that's not true; I am one of God's most lonely men.
Charles Bukowski
The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
When we first got married, we made a pact. It was this: In our life together, it was decided I would make all of the big decisions and my wife would make all of the little decisions. For fifty years, we have held true to that agreement. I believe that is the reason for the success in our marriage. However, the strange thing is that in fifty years, there hasn’t been one big decision.
Albert Einstein
This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.
Friedrich Nietzsche
But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology.
Max Born
While the gods remained more human, the men were more divine.
Friedrich Schiller
Examine the lives of the best and more fruitful men and peoples, and ask yourselves whether a tree, if it is to grow proudly into the sky, can do without bad weather and storms: whether unkindness and opposition from without, whether some sort of hatred, envy, obstinacy, mistrust, severity, greed and violence do not belong to the favouring circumstances without which a great increase even in virtue is hardly possible. The poison which destroys the weaker nature strengthens the stronger – and he does not call it poison, either.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The discerning one walketh amongst men as amongst animals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Most men will not swim before they are able to.
Hermann Hesse
Love is for real men.
Charles Bukowski
Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust.
Oliver Markus Malloy
Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority-- where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;-- exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Men are bad cyclists, hunters of wild animals, kamikazes, samurai and Christian martyrs.
Christine Grän