Quotes by German Authors - Page 92

La plus grande chute est celle qu'on fait du haut de l'innocence.
Heiner Müller
Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.
E.T.A. Hoffmann
A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.
Charles Bukowski
Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what the writer wrote never was published and he didn't have enough the money to publish it himself, then he thought he was truly great. The truth, however, was there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter.
Charles Bukowski
Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out
Charles Bukowski
There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.
Charles Bukowski
In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.
Walter Moers
As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.
Cornelia Funke
not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.
Charles Bukowski
I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
Arthur Holitscher
What is your advice to young writers?""Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.""What is your advice to older writers?""If you're still alive, you don't need any advice.""What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?""What makes you take a shit?
Charles Bukowski
People who understand everything get no stories.
Bertolt Brecht
Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfängt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhört. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.
Walter Moers
if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.
Charles Bukowski
There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
Charles Bukowski
Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.
Cornelia Funke
The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Friedrich Nietzsche
take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning
Charles Bukowski
writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
Charles Bukowski
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Walter Benjamin
nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.
Charles Bukowski
I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.
Charles Bukowski
You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.
Cornelia Funke
unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it
Charles Bukowski
the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever
Charles Bukowski
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One should use common words to say uncommon things
Arthur Schopenhauer
He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
Charles Bukowski
If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.
Martin Luther
great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I made it.
Charles Bukowski
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
Cornelia Funke
All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
Hermann Hesse
I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.
Anne Frank
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann
It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.
Adolf Hitler
Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God--the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Tell me, son... have you ever been intimidated by anyone?''Oh yes,' said Thomas. 'I don't believe it. By whom?''By Our Lord... on the altar.
Louis de Wohl
What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the existence of the anticipatory towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy for the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect.
Peter Sloterdijk
The highest does not stand without the lowest.
Thomas à Kempis
Faith in the power of prayer … is … faith in miraculous power; and faith in miracles is … the essence of faith in general. … [F]aith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason, … The specific object of faith, therefore, is miracle; … To faith nothing is impossible, and miracle only gives actuality to this omnipotence of faith[.]
Ludwig Feuerbach
Faith does not limit itself by the idea of a world, a universe, a necessity.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Faith includes both an immediate awareness of something unconditional and the courage to take the risk of uncertainty upon itself. Faith says "Yes" in spite of the anxiety of "No."Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality
Paul Tillich
Molitveni jezik jedini je jezik u kojem nema jezičnih zabrana. Kako je već rečeno, on je obuhvatniji od jezika vjere koja je sigurna u samu sebe. U jeziku molitve može se naime reći i to da se ne može vjerovati.
Johann Baptist Metz
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race...
Friedrich Nietzsche
Faith is stronger than so-called reason.
Hermann Hesse
Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy's hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is not inner discord between the private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If the whole universe can be found in our own body and mind, this is where we need to make our inquires. We all have the answers within ourselves, we just have not got in touch with them yet. The potential of finding the truth within requires faith in ourselves.
Ayya Khema
Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant— which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer."Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will [ This conception of "freedom of the will" ( alias, autonomy) does not involve any belief in what Nietzsche called "the superstition of free will" in section 345 ( alias, the exemption of human actions from an otherwise universal determinism).] that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated.
Paul Tillich
Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place...
Joseph Goebbels
Some acts of faith, I believe, have the power to grant us something infinitely wiser than we imagine
Ursula Hegi
There are some who are still weak in faith, who ought to be instructed, and who would gladly believe as we do. But their ignorance prevents them...we must bear patiently with these people and not use our liberty; since it brings to peril or harm to body or soul...but if we use our liberty unnecessarily, and deliberately cause offense to our neighbor, we drive away the very one who in time would come to our faith. Thus St. Paul circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3) because simple minded Jews had taken offense; he thought: what harm can it do, since they are offended because of ignorance? But when, in Antioch, they insisted that he out and must circumcise Titus (Gal. 2:3) Paul withstood them all and to spite them refused to have Titus circumcised... He did the same when St. Peter...it happened in this way: when Peter was with the Gentiles he ate pork and sausages with them, but when the Jews came in, he abstained from this food and did not eat as he did before. Then the Gentiles who had become Christians though: Alas! we, too, must be like the Jews, eat no pork, and live according to the law of Moses. But when Paul learned that they were acting to the injury of evangelical freedom, he reproved Peter publicly and read him an apostolic lecture, saying: "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?" (Gal. 2:14). Thus we, too, should order our lives and use our liberty at the proper time, so that Christian liberty may suffer no injury, and no offense be given to our weak brothers and sisters who are still without the knowledge of this liberty.
Martin Luther