Quotes by German Authors - Page 96

The happy man needs nothing and no one. Not that he holds himself aloof, for indeed he is in harmony with everything and everyone; everything is "in him"; nothing can happen to him. The same may also be said for the contemplative person; he needs himself alone; he lacks nothing.
Josef Pieper
The happy life does not mean loving what we possess, but possessing what we love." Possession of the beloved, St. Thomas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation.
Josef Pieper
The ultimate meaning of the active life is to make possible the happiness of contemplation.
Josef Pieper
Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Once he said to her: 'You are like me; you are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else, and within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it.
Hermann Hesse
Happiness,... even the smallest happiness, is like a step out of Time, and the greatest happiness is sharing in Eternity.
Josef Pieper
An empty bus hurtles through the starry nightPerhaps the driver is singingand happy because he sings.
Günter Grass
(the whole world is at thethroat of the world,everybody feels angry,short-changed, cheated,everybody is despondent,disillusioned.)I welcomed shots of peace, tattered shards ofhappiness.
Charles Bukowski
He took a hairpin out of my untidy hair (by now my complicated arrangement of ringlets must have looked as if a couple of birds had been nesting there); he took a strand of it and wound it around his finger. With his other hand he began stroking my face, and then he bent down and kissed me again, this time very cautiously. I closed my eyes - and the same thing happened as before: my brain suffered that delicious break in transmission.
Kerstin Gier
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels.
Bertolt Brecht
Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.
Karl Marx
A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.
Hermann Hesse
Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but you thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.
Eckhart Tolle
Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes
Bertolt Brecht
and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical senseand are not easy to fool with laughter
Charles Bukowski
Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.
Ernst Jünger
In the end, the number of prayers we say may contribute to our happiness, but the number of prayers we answer may be of even greater importance.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
Thomas Mann
Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.Let it teach you Being.Let it teach you integrity — which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.
Eckhart Tolle
I do not think we have a "right" to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks.
Marlene Dietrich
Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer
Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?
Bernhard Schlink
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.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. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
Karl Marx
Whoever is happy will make others happy.
Anne Frank
We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
Charles Bukowski
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Bodily and spiritual affliction are the surest sign of Divine predilection. Gratitude for suffering is a precious jewel for our heavenly crown... Man should always firmly believe that God sends just that trial which is most beneficial for him.
St. Gertrude the Great
When you tune into your soul essence and are in harmony with the Supreme, you are tapped into your superpowers.
Sharon Kirstin
Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.
St. Hildegard of Bingen
I contemplated man's little spark, what it should be valued before God alongside of this great work of heaven and earth.
Jakob Böhme
The shadow demons (fears) you've been avoiding keep you stuck in a rut, a prisoner in your own life - it's time to break free and shine!
Sharon Kirstin
Just like a flower, you are a creation of unique beauty from the one essence of life.
Sharon Kirstin
Shine the light of awareness on your disempowering beliefs and choose to substitute them with empowering beliefs. This way you will choose love over fear and your path to purpose becomes clear.
Sharon Kirstin
First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.
Thomas Kempis
Hast du es schon gelesen?", fragte er.Er spielte auf das Buch an, das ich bei ihm gekauft hatte."Ja. Es war anders als ich es in Erinnerung hatte, aber nicht schlecht."Das Buch war ein Kalssiker und ich hatte es als Kind mehrfach verschlungen."So ist das mit verlorenen Dingen", meinte Jacob und bot mir ein Glas grünen Tee an.
Anne Krüger
All one can really leave one's children is what's inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.
Wernher von Braun
No one of real intelligence will accept anything just because some authority declares it be so. Don't accept the truth of anything you have not confirmed for yourself.
Paul Hoffmann
To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness
Robert Muller
Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.
Albert Einstein
People are a soul-ego-spacesuit.
Stefan Emunds
I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims.
Werner Heisenberg
One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless...
Hermann Hesse
One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.
Michael Ende
He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.
Hermann Hesse
I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.
Georg Baselitz
We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Stuff your brain with knowledge.
Karl Lagerfeld
I am in the world to change the world
Käthe Kollwitz
Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.
Karl Lagerfeld
Many's the man/ who thought himself wise/ but what he needed/ he did not know...
Richard Wagner
When people want to be liked for what they did, they should stop.
Karl Lagerfeld
It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong.
Otto von Bismarck
You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and asseses of burden!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.
Ludwig Börne
The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Erich Maria Remarque
For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.
Erich Maria Remarque