Quotes by German Authors - Page 84

Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
At a time I used to think that in a world without guards people would walk differently from the way we do in our country. Where people are allowed to think and write differently, I thought, they will also walk differently.
Herta Müller
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure ad moving on. Yet most people are stricken wth fear. They fear failure so much that they fail.
Charles Bukowski
Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I didn't like anything. Maybe I was afraid. That was it - I was afraid. I wanted to sit alone in a room with the shades down. I feasted upon that. I was a crank. I was a lunatic.
Charles Bukowski
I am too sick to lay downthe sidewalks frighten methe whole damned city frightens me,what I will becomewhat I have becomefrightens me.
Charles Bukowski
When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently.
Eckhart Tolle
Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.
Cornelia Funke
Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.
Cornelia Funke
The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenants of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenant undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else
Max Stirner
Enlightenment arrives like a thief in the middle of the dark night of the soul.
Stefan Emunds
How simple our Lord's word is, Love thy neighbor. Just think how that word has been twisted around, just because it's hard to love thy neighbor.
Edgar Maass
For the soul, understand, is itself the whole world.
Edgar Maass
Knowledge without love is worse than ignorance. Action without love is madness...
Edgar Maass
The universe is a gigantic amusement park in which we can have a ride or two.
Stefan Emunds
Spirituality is the realization of the totality of our being.
Stefan Emunds
Spirituality wants to know and experience higher states of mind and being. It wants to wrestle with angels and look the Creator in the eye.
Stefan Emunds
The soul is imbued with a yearning that is carried, like a torch, from incarnation to incarnation. It burns with a curiosity about life and it’s true identity. Souls live, strive, and evolve, driven to seeking the truth about the world and themselves.
Stefan Emunds
There’s a way to live like a god.
Stefan Emunds
Spirituality is 80% attitude and 20% knowledge.
Stefan Emunds
The idea that I could work wonders as the Lord flutters through my mind like a glamorous butterfly. I hasten to catch it, but it escapes into the depths of my mind.
Stefan Emunds
I seem to know a lot about myself, but can’t tell who I am.
Stefan Emunds
While the world changes, the cross stands firm.
Saint Bruno
Try to imagine this formless, liquid abyss of many waters and surfaces. With and within this awesome, abysmal substance, God Mother creates universes. We are made from this stuff, literally! And we literally live, move, and have our being in this fathomless, multi-dimensional matrix.
Stefan Emunds
In the beginnings, God Mother separates the earth from the heavens.
Stefan Emunds
And our Divine Parents have been molding God Child’s soul from stardust. And They have been breathing life-breath into its nose, and God Child’s soul has been existing as a Soul of Life.
Stefan Emunds
Since time immemorial, the serpent has symbolized organic vitality. Serpents move in curves and so does energy. The serpent developed from the Light created on the first cosmic day. In the firmament it manifests as the life-breath that animates souls. In the physical universe it manifests electro-magnetism, the light in substance so to speak.
Stefan Emunds
God Child is a free and inspirational translation of Adam. Adam means 'human', not 'man'. The Hebrew for 'man' is 'aish'. In English man can mean both man and human, which may have caused the confusion in the first place. If Adam isn’t the first male Homo sapiens, who or what is he?
Stefan Emunds
As I stumbled into confusion about what was real and what was not, the strangest thing happened: The world disintegrated. Reality collapsed, or my perception of it. It ripped apart like a dry skin under pressure, giving way to something I can only describe as ineffable dimensions, depths upon depths.
Stefan Emunds
Go where thou wilt, seek what thou wilt, and thou shalt not find a higher way above, nor a safer way below, than the way of the holy Cross."- Thomas A Kempis (The Following of Christ)
Thomas à Kempis
Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.
Johann Baptist Metz
And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egoism and instinctuality, and that even such sublime creations as the Order were born in this cloudy torrent and sooner or later will be swallowed up by it again...Nor was this ever merely an intellectual problem for him. Rather, it engaged his innermost self more than any other problem, and he felt it as partly his responsibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an ideal they have believed in, or the country and community they love, afflicted with ills.
Hermann Hesse
...your tranquil yes to the changing over into the formless void of the unlimited.
Hermann Hesse
Ibn Mas'ud said that Allah's Messenger said: Abusing a Muslim is sinful and fighting with his tantamount to Kufr. Bukhari Muslim
Ahmad Von Denffer
Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is "possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.
Josef Pieper
A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
Erich Maria Remarque
The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.
Felix Adler
It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.
Erich Maria Remarque
Through the present moment, you have access to the power of life itself, that which has traditionally been called "God." As soon as you turn away from it, God ceases to be a reality in your life, and all you are left with is the mental concept of God, which some people believe in and others deny. Even belief in God is only a poor substitute for the living reality of God manifesting every moment of your life.
Eckhart Tolle
Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.
Meister Eckhart
O heavenly Father,protect and bless all thingsthat have breath: guard themfrom all evil and let them sleep in peace.
Albert Schweitzer
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn't say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.
Charles Bukowski
Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
W.G. Sebald
Being ill when you are a child or growing up is such an enchanted interlude! The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferate out of the books you read. The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into something new, both familiar and strange; monsters come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet, and chairs, tables, bookcases and wardrobes burst out of their normal shapes and become mountains and buildings and ships you can almost touch although they're far away. Through the long hours of the night you have the Church clock for company and the rumble of the occasional passing car that throws it's headlights across the walls and ceilings. These are hours without sleep, which is not to say they're sleepless, because on the contrary, they're not about lack of anything, they are rich and full. Desires, memories, fears, passions form labryinths in which we lose and find then lose ourselves again. They are hours where anything is possible, good or bad.
Bernhard Schlink
The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their help he was always getting to know new people, many of whom even became his friends.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The art of not reading is a very important one. [. . .] [Y]ou should remember that he who writes for fools always find a large public. – A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: For life is short.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Every true reader could, even if not one new book were published, spend decades and centuries studying on, fighting on, continuing to rejoice in the treasure of those already at hand.
Hermann Hesse
Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.
Peter Sloterdijk
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Books are never harmless...they either strengthen us or they weaken us in our faith. Some of them do this even as they entertain us, others as they teach us. In an invisible way their teaching penetrates into our hearts and souls, to continue its work inside, and we inhale the spirit of these books as healing or poisonous vapors. They can bring the greatest benefits and the greatest ruin, for from their ideas that they spread come the deeds of the future.
Peter Prange
All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?
Friedrich Nietzsche
There were adventure stories supplied with cloths for mopping your brow, thrillers containing pressed leaves of soothing valerian to be sniffed when the suspense became too great, and books with stout locks sealed by the Atlantean censorship authorities ("Sale permitted, reading prohibited!"). One shop sold nothing but 'half' works that broke off in the middle because their author had died while writing them; another specialised in novels whose protagonists were insects. I also saw a Wolperting shop that sold nothing but books on chess and another patronised exclusively by dwarfs with blond beards, all of whom wore eye-shades.
Walter Moers