Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 26

Voll Blüten steht der Pfirsichbaum nicht jede wächst zur Frucht sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum durch Blau und Wolkenflucht. Wie Blüten geh'n Gedanken auf hundert an jedem Tag -- lass' blühen, lass' dem Ding den Lauf frag' nicht nach dem Ertrag! Es muss auch Spiel und Unschuld sein und Blütenüberfluss sonst wär' die Welt uns viel zu klein und Leben kein Genuss.
Hermann Hesse
In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.
Albert Einstein
Un soir qu'ils étaient couchés l'un près de l'autre, comme elle lui demandait d'inventer un poème qui commencerait par je connais un beau pays, il s'exécuta sur-le-champ. Je connais un beau pays Il est de l'or et d'églantine Tout le monde s'y sourit Ah quelle aventure fine Les tigres y sont poltrons Les agneaux ont fière mine À tous les vieux vagabonds Ariane donne des tartines. Alors, elle lui baisa le la main, et il eut honte de cette admiration.
Albert Cohen
Shriveled apple cores stood side by side on the window sill, a long row of them with their seed chambers bitten open and the pointed sees scattered on the floor. The brown, discolored remnants of their flesh bore the imprint of his grandfather's teeth. That was the image This was left with, the one that ever since was the first to recur when he thought of his dead grandfather: shriveled apple cores on the sill of a window that looked out onto an overgrown garden.
Hansjörg Schertenleib
And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.
Hermann Hesse
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.
Alain de Botton
For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
Hermann Hesse
Ich werde stehen und warten.Ich werde müde werden.Ich werde nicht einschlafen.Ich werde sterben.
Hermann Hesse
I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.
Robert Walser
Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them or a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave, shabby existence. They are the sons of Adam, who was driven out of Paradise; the brothers of the animals, of innocence. Out of heaven's hand they accept what is given them from moment to moment: sun, rain, fog, snow, warmth, cold, comfort, and hardship; time does not exist for them and neither does history, or ambition, or that bizarre idol called progress and evolution, in which houseowners believe so desperately. A wayfarer may be delicate or crude, artful or awkward, brave or cowardly—he is always a child at heart, living in the first day of creation, before the beginning of the history of the world, his life always guided by a few simple instincts and needs. He may be intelligent or stupid; he may be deeply aware of the fleeting fragility of all living things, of how pettily and fearfully each living creature carries its bit of warm blood through the glaciers of cosmic space, or he may merely follow the commands of his poor stomach with childlike greed—he is always the opponent, the deadly enemy of the established proprietor, who hates him, despises him, or fears him, because he does not wish to be reminded that all existence is transitory, that life is constantly wilting, that merciless icy death fills the cosmos all around.
Hermann Hesse
We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.
Hermann Hesse
From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.
Albert Einstein
I’ve always believed that, as long as we’re left alone to do what we’re good at, and be who we’ve decided to be, things will turn out all right in the end. Now, me being strapped to a chair, unable to see what is going on, and Egan coming to the rescue, carrying a freaking bomb. That is not — by a mile — all right.
Cristelle Comby
As darkness falls and sleep pulls at me, I wonder, not for the first time, about life and death. Both are real and neither would exist without the other. They balance each other, as do night and day. Hot and cold. Summer and winter.Some people struggle with this concept. At times, they even forget all about it. But if you remember just one thing, let it be this: life always balances itself out. For every bad guy out there, there is someone equally good to make things right again.
Cristelle Comby
Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.
Alain de Botton
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
Alain de Botton
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Albert Einstein
Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.
Denis de Rougemont
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
Alain de Botton
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.
Alain de Botton
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
Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.
Hermann Hesse
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
Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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
Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To be immortal and then die
Jean-Luc Godard
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
cuando se es joven hay que ser un cero a la izquierda, pues no existe nada más perjudicial que destacar pronto, prematuramente, en cualquier cosa.
Robert Walser
Se aburren quienes se pasan la vida esperando que algo los estimule desde fuera...
Robert Walser
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
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
all appears to change when we change
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The more you look into and understand yourself, the less judgmental you become towards others.
Tariq Ramadan
If one tries to navigate unknown waters one runs the risk of shipwreck
Albert Einstein
I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.
Hermann Hesse
One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.
Hermann Hesse
Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
C.G. Jung
Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
Albert Einstein
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
Hermann Hesse
It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.
Albert Einstein
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.
Albert Einstein
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
Albert Einstein
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein
God goes with thoughtless people.
Robert Walser
God arranges everything for us, so that we need have no more fear or trouble and may be quite sure that all things will come right in the end.
Johanna Spyri
I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is?
Pascal Mercier
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
Albert Einstein
Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
We must never forget to pray, and to ask God to remember us when He is arranging things, so that we too may feel safe and have no anxiety about what is going to happen.
Johanna Spyri
In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
The nativity mystery “conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary”, means, that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus , his “climbing down of God” is: Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary! Here is a human being, the Virgin Mary, and as he comes from God, Jesus comes also from this human being. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God, he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not only similar to us, he is like us.
Karl Barth
God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.
Hans Urs von Balthasar