Quotes by German Authors - Page 86

It was during my enchanted days of travel that the idea came to me, which, through the years, has come into my thoughts again and again and always happily—the idea that geology is the music of the earth.
Hans Cloos
Will it be possible to solve these problems? It is certain that nobody has thus far observed the transformation of dead into living matter, and for this reason we cannot form a definite plan for the solution of this problem of transformation. But we see that plants and animals during their growth continually transform dead into living matter, and that the chemical processes in living matter do not differ in principle from those in dead matter. There is, therefore, no reason to predict that abiogenesis is impossible, and I believe that it can only help science if the younger investigators realize that experimental abiogenesis is the goal of biology.
Jacques Loeb
The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those have not viewed the world.
Alexander von Humboldt
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
Thomas Mann
There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Outside our consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow borderland of the senses. No communication between the two worlds is possible excepting across the narrow strip. For a proper understanding of ourselves and of the world, it is of the highest importance that this borderland should be thoroughly explored.”Heinrich Hertz’ Keynote Address at the Imperial Palace, Berlin, August, 1891
Heinrich Hertz
Language as putative science. - The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreame knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later - only now - it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be put back. - Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the descernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.
Albert Einstein
Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.
Werner Heisenberg
Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.
Karl Jaspers
Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.
Johannes Kepler
None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.
Max Planck
I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies
Johannes Kepler
New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.
Max Planck
The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.
Max Planck
There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
Karl Marx
Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit.
Rudolf Arnheim
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein
We ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the universe. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the skies so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.
Johannes Kepler
Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.
Albert Einstein
One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
Albert Einstein
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
Max Planck
A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
Albert Einstein
A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
The human spirit must prevail over technology.
Albert Einstein
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right a single experiment can prove me wrong.
Albert Einstein
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
Bertolt Brecht
Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.
Arthur Schopenhauer
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
Albert Einstein
Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.
Albert Einstein
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe.
Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery eac
Albert Einstein
Approaching the forest from the west was no army, but a delegation of Grailsundanian master surgeons on their way to an appendix conference . . . But that isn't the craziest part of the story - oh, no, my boy, for approaching from the east was a party of itinerant watchmakers bound for the pocket-watch fair at Wimbleton . . . But not even that is the craziest part of the story! For apporaching from the south were over a hundred armourers and locksmiths on their way to Florinth, where some power-hungry prince had commissioned them to build a monstrous war machine . . . Well, that would be enough crazy coincedences for an averagely crazy story but the battle of Nurn Forest involved the most improbable coincedences in the history of Zamonia. For entering the forest, this time from the north came a delegation of alchemists.
Walter Moers
Rumo!" said Rumo. "That's right!" Smyke exclaimed. "You Rumo, me Smyke." "You Rumo, me Smyke." Rumo repeated eagerly. "No, no." Smyke chuckled.
Walter Moers
I just wrote a book. But don't go and buy it yet, because I don't think it's finished.
Lawrence Welk
When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock.So I stopped wearing socks.
Albert Einstein
On horseback you feel as if you're moving in time to classical music a camel seems to progress to the beat of a drum played by a drunk.
Walter Moers
Did you know that Gideon and I were trained in Krav Maga?" Charlotte took another step closer to me, and I automatically took one back."No, but did /you/ know that at this moment you look like that crazy rodent in Ice Age?
Kerstin Gier
Heresy no longer existed within religion itwas founded in the state.
Reinhart Koselleck
Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
Albert Einstein
A day, whether six or seven years ago or whether six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in now.
Meister Eckhart
Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought”, “a priori givens”, etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.
Albert Einstein
How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology. They happily began discussions about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, through their tenacity in defending their views, that the subject seemed important to them. Indeed, one should not be surprised at this.
Albert Einstein
Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: "What shall we do and how shall we live?"' That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science might yet be of use to the one who puts the question correctly.
Max Weber
Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.
Albert Einstein
We're all a genius, but If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Albert Einstien
Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.
Max Weber
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.
Jürgen Habermas
My work has always tried to unite the True with the Beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the Beautiful.
Hermann Weyl
And every science, when we understand it not as an instrument of power and domination but as an adventure in knowledge pursued by our species across the ages, is nothing but this harmony, more or less vast, more or less rich from one epoch to another, which unfurls over the course of generations and centuries, by the delicate counterpoint of all the themes appearing in turn, as if summoned from the void.
Alexandre Grothendieck