Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 4

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived lives of the parents.
Carl Jung
There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I hate books they teach us only to talk about what we do not know.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Reading after a certain (time) 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
Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein
No this trick won't work. . . . How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Albert Einstein
Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes it visible.
Paul Klee
The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.
Paul Klee
Genius is personal decided by fate but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.
Le Corbusier
The materials of city planning are sky space trees steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy.
Le Corbusier
Death does not frighten me but dying obscurely and above all uselessly does.
Isabelle Eberhardt
To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Carl Jung
For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate it oppresses.
Carl Jung
I have accepted all and I am free. The inner chains are broken as well as those outside.
C. F. Ramuz
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Carl Jung
To repel one's cross is to make it heavier.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Happiness ... can exist only in acceptance.
Denis de Rougemont
The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
Carl Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
C.G. Jung
Fear is the possibility of freedom.
Peter Stamm
Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.
Robert Walser
Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse.
Alice MIller
The more we idealized the past, however, and refuse to acknowledge or childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.
Alice MIller
Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton
Let twelve angels come into being to rule over chaos and the underworld." And look, from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means in translation 'rebel'; others call him Yaldabaoth.
Rodolphe Kasser
A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country and public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all...
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.
Albert Einstein
Feathers fell from the sky. Like black snow, they drifted onto an old city called Bath.
Stefan Bachmann
looking for the pi in my onion
Natasha Tsakos
Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul.
C.G. Jung
Your growing antlers,' Bambi continued, 'are proof of your intimate place in the forest, for of all the things that live and grow only the trees and the deer shed their foliage each year and replace it more strongly, more magnificently, in the spring. Each year the trees grow larger and put on more leaves. And so you too increase in size and wear a larger, stronger crown.
Felix Salten
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, who ever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my own smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my father, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
Hermann Hesse
That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier...
Hermann Hesse
A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
Albert Einstein
Seeking nothing, emulating nothing, breathing gently, he moved in an atmosphere of imperishable calm, impresihable light, inviolable peace.
Hermann Hesse
Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.
Alain de Botton
What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.
Alain de Botton
To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.
Alain de Botton
Success = 1 part work + 1 part play + 1 part keep your mouth shut
Albert Einstein
There is no rule that is true under all circumstances, for this is the real and not a statistical world. Because the statistical method shows only the average aspects, it creates an artificial and predominantly conceptual picture of reality.
C.G. Jung
Modern physics, having advanced into another world beyond conceivability, cannot dispense with the concept of a space-time continuum. Insofar as psychology penetrates into the unconscious, it probably has no alternative but to acknowledge the “indistinctness” or the impossibility of distinguishing between time and space, as well as their psychic relativity. The world of classical physics has not ceased to exist, and by the same token, the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious… “Causality” is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term “connection” or “attachment.” But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time.[…]I would now like to propose that instead of “causality” we have “(relatively) constant connection through effect,” and instead of synchronicity we have (relatively) constant connection through contingency, equivalence, or “meaning.
C.G. Jung
Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which “similar” things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.
C.G. Jung
We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.
C.G. Jung
As soon as we notice that certain types of event "like" to cluster together at certain times, we begin to understand the attitude of the Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philosophy, and even building are based on a "science" of meaningful coincidences. The classical Chinese texts did not ask what causes what, but rather what "likes" to occur with what.
M.L. von Franz
i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.
Jean-Luc Godard
When the world is at peace, when all things are tranquil and all men obey their superiors in all their courses, then music can be perfected. When desires and passions do not turn into wrongful paths, music can be perfected. Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.
Hermann Hesse
[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.
Alain de Botton
It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are...
Max Frisch
When theology recognizes one thing properly, it mis-recognizes something else all the more thoroughly.
Karl Barth
Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too? And could you in any way protect your son from Sansara? How could you? By means of teachings, prayer, admonition? My dear, have you entirely forgotten that story, that story containing so many lessons, that story about Siddhartha, a Brahman's son, which you once told me here on this very spot? Who has kept the Samana Siddhartha safe from Sansara, from sin, from greed, from foolishness? Were his father's religious devotion, his teachers warnings, his own knowledge, his own search able to keep him safe? Which father, which teacher had been able to protect him from living his life for himself, from soiling himself with life, from burdening himself with guilt, from drinking the bitter drink for himself, from finding his path for himself? Would you think, my dear, anybody might perhaps be spared from taking this path? That perhaps your little son would be spared, because you love him, because you would like to keep him from suffering and pain and disappointment? But even if you would die ten times for him, you would not be able to take the slightest part of his destiny upon yourself.
Hermann Hesse
then Siddhartha began to understand that his son had not brought him happiness and peace, but suffering and worry. But he loved him, and he preferred the suffering and worries of love over happiness and joy without the boy.
Hermann Hesse
After having been standing by the gate of the garden for a long time, Siddhartha realised that his desire was foolish, which had made him go up to this place, that he could not help his son, that he was not allowed to cling him. Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine.
Hermann Hesse
Intelligent life on other planets? I'm not even sure there is on earth!
Albert Einstein
...he had read von Lambert's book on terrorism, there were two pages devoted to the Arab resistance movement, von Lambert refused to call them terrorists, which didn't preclude, and he had emphasized this, that nonterrorists were also capable of atrocities, Auschwitz, for instance, was not the work of terrorists but of state employees...
Friedrich Dürrenmatt