Quotes by German Authors - Page 90

The drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imaginesuch a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference – perhaps,indeed, we too are unrequited lovers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The intellect, like all cultural values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.
Max Weber
So many questions remain unanswered. Perhaps we are poorer for having lost a possible explanation or richer for having gained a mystery. But aren't both possibilities equally intriguing?
Peter Wohlleben
Knowledge is power. The moment the masses acquire this power, control fades. And when control fades, chaos erupts.
Felix O. Hartmann
Nothing is more beautiful than to know all.
Athanasius Kircher
Collaborations are the black holes of knowledge regimes. They willingly produce nothingness, opulence and ill behavior. And it is their very vacuity that is their strength...It does not entail the transmission of something from those who have to those who do not, but rather the setting in motion of a chain of unforeseen accesses.
Florian Schneider
In order to exert influence over people, there were other things that could be used besides love. Knowledge seemed to be an equally strong force, perhaps even stronger. Whoever possessed knowledge not only had power over the changeable passions of people, but also power over their thinking, over their minds, hearts and souls.
Peter Prange
Whoever possessed knowledge not only had power over the changeable passions of people, but also power over their thinking, over their minds, hearts and souls.
Peter Prange
The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.
Friedrich Schiller
The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives.
Jürgen Moltmann
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Curiosity is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Knowledge kills action action requires the veils of illusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.
Hermann Hesse
There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge-that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.
Hermann Hesse
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
Albert Einstein
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.
Werner Heisenberg
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
Albert Einstein
I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
Hermann Hesse
Information is not knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.", 1953)
Albert Einstein
My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
Albert Einstein
Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.
Susan Neiman
On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
Karl Marx
Being doped is a pleasure you pay for. There was always opium there for the people -- in the end it tainted their whole faith. If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for -- although of course it may have been competing with them for the first place among the rulers, as in the Middle Ages. Whenever it was a question of keeping the serfs, and then the paid slaves down, the dope-dealers came unfailingly to the help of the oppressors.
Ernst Bloch
The padres set great store by addressing prayer to personal gods: 'Genuine prayer exists only in religions in which there is a God as a person and a shape and endowed with a will.'That was stated by a famous Protestant. The anarch does not want to have anything to do with that conception. As for the One God: while he may be able to shape persons, he is not a person himself, and the he is already a patriarchal prejudice.A neuter One is beyond our grasp, while man converses ten with the Many Gods on equal terms, whether as their inventor or as their discoverer. In any case, it is man who named the gods. This is not to be confused with a high level soliloquy. Divinity must, without a doubt, be inside us and recognized as being inside us; otherwise we would have no concept of gods.
Ernst Jünger
In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.
Werner Heisenberg
We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.
Bernd Heinrich
Pronto me di cuenta de que estas enseñanzas podían ser un consuelo sólo para los que las aceptaran literalmente y que creyeran ser la verdad. Si fueran, como para mí, en parte bella literatura, parte símbolos intrincados; un intento de explicación mitológica del mundo, uno podría instruirse y apreciarlas, pero uno no aprendería la forma de vivir y sacar fuerza de ellas.
Hermann Hesse
It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge.
Arthur Schopenhauer
What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Während Wissenschaftler wissen, dass sie nur etwas "glauben" (= für "wahr" halten), was heute angemessen erscheint, morgen aber möglicherweise schon überholt ist, glauben Gläubige, etwas zu wissen, was auch morgen noch gültig sein soll, obwohl es in der Regel schon heute widerlegt ist.
Michael Schmidt-Salomon
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence -- these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.
Albert Einstein
Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time.
Walter Kaufmann
If you wish to stand and progress as you ought, hold yourself an exile and a pilgrim on the earth.
Thomas à Kempis
Religio", as we know, harks back to a word (re-ligio) meaning "bond" and that is precisely what the anarch rejects. He does not go in for Moses with the Ten Commandments or, indeed, for any prophets. Nor does he wish to hear anything concerning gods or rumors about them, except as a historian - or unless they appear to him. That is when the conflicts begin.So, if I state, "in order to pray," I am following an innate instinct that is no weaker than the sexual drive - in fact, even stronger. The two are alike insofar as foul things can happen when they are suppressed.
Ernst Jünger
A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Principles are only tools in the hands of God they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life." Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich
Im Verlaufe nicht nur der ökonomischen, sondern auch der politischen Globalisierung kann das kardinale völkerrechtliche Prinzip der Nichteinmischung in Gefahr geraten. Besonders gilt dies für dasVerhältnis des Westens zur islamischen Kultur. Vornehmlich von meinem toten muslimischen Freunde Anwar as-Sadat habe ich den Respekt gegenüber anderen Religionen gelernt. Ich habe von ihm gelernt die gleichen Wurzeln von Judentum und Christentum und Islam. Und inzwischen habe ich ausserdem gelernt, dass Konfuzius, Sokrates oder Lao Tse und ebenso Zarathustra und Gautama Buddha ein halbes Jahrtausend, Moses oder Echnaton ein ganzes Jahrtausend vor Jesus von Nazareth gelebt haben - und dass sie wahrscheinlich deswegen doch nicht unglücklicher gewesen sind als wir Heutigen. Unter den globalisierten Umständen der heutigen Menschheit geziemt jedermann Respekt und Toleranz gegenüber den Kulturen der anderen.
Helmut Schmidt
Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood, Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men - each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature - are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. 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
However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!
Friedrich Nietzsche
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
Erich Fromm
Let us see rather that like Janus—or better, like Yama, the Brahmin god of death—religion has two faces, one very friendly, one very gloomy...
Arthur Schopenhauer
Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
Albert Einstein
There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible, and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method'.
Max Born
It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---
Friedrich Nietzsche
Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man.Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society.But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.
Karl Marx
So Jesus in the throes of his Passion is an image of hope: God is on the side of those who suffer.
Pope Benedict XVI
Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times and not in thee thyself then art thou lost eternally.
Angelus Silesius
I don't trust Catholics," I said, "because they take advantage of you.""And Protestants?" he asked with a laugh."I loathe the way they fumble around with their consciences.""And atheists?" He was still laughing."They bore me because all they ever talk about is God.
Heinrich Böll
I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.
Albert Einstein
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
Albert Einstein