Quotes by Swiss Authors - Page 5

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
C.G. Jung
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.
Albert Einstein
Whether the woman shares the man's passion or not, whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore not always with the same success.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Everything is intimateNothing is personal
Natasha Tsakos
Why was it, do you think, I was able to recognise you and understand you?""Why, Hermine? Tell me!""Because it's the same for me as you because I am alone exactly as you are, because I'm as little fond of life and people and myself as you are and can put up with them as little. There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
Hermann Hesse
If the gooseberry said: 'I haven't the heart to be a real proper gooseberry because if everyone were a gooseberry the world wouldn't continue to exist' this would be a stupid argument and the world would be deprived of a useful fruit. If you are called upon to be a 'gooseberry' in all the senses--pleasant or ludicrous--of the word, you should be one with all your heart and soul, without a backward glance.
Pierre Ceresole
Branches or types are characterized by the plan of their structure,Classes, by the manner in which that plan is executed, as far as ways and means are concerned, Orders, by the degrees of complication of that structure, Families, by their form, as far as determined by structure, Genera, by the details of the execution in special parts, andSpecies, by the relations of individuals to one another and to the world in which they live, as well as by the proportions of their parts, their ornamentation, etc.
Louis Agassiz
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.
Le Corbusier
Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.
Max Luthi
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
Albert Einstein
We can be sure that we will hold on to the deathbed as part of the last balance sheet – and this part will taste bitter as cyanide – that we have wasted too much, much too much strength and time on getting angry and getting even with others in a helpless shadow theater, which only we, who have suffered importantly, knew anything about ~ Night Train to Lisbon
Pascal Mercier
Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.
Pascal Mercier
No permanence is ours; we are a waveThat flows to fit whatever form it finds:Through day or night, cathedral or caveWe pass forever, craving form that binds.
Hermann Hesse
As she put it, she knew of nothing so ravishing as having a child whom she could whip whenever she was in a bad mood.("The Queen Fantasque")
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I don’t deny that it was more than a coincidence which made things turn out as they did, it was a whole train of coincidences. But what has providence to do with it? I don’t need any mystical explanation for the occurrence of the improbable; mathematics explains it adequately, as far as I’m concerned.Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the one will come up approximately 1,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable. But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term probability includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.
Max Frisch
[The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy.
Albert Einstein
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.
Albert Einstein
Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.
Leonhard Euler
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
Ferdinand de Saussure
It is not against the law to drink in public places, and you will see people drinking in parks or by the lake. The Swiss have a more relaxed attitude to alcohol consumption. From the age of 16, young people can be served beer or wine in a bar.
Clare O'Dea
Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are
Alain de Botton
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
Albert Einstein
The question that sometime's drive's me hazy, am i or the other's crazy?
Albert Einstein
It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one's personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
C.G. Jung
Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.
C.G. Jung
What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
Alain de Botton
One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
Alain de Botton
All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.
Hermann Hesse
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
Albert Einstein
There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. Thee is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and so dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.
Hermann Hesse
Artists are social sensors and transmitters of ideas
Natasha Tsakos
...and as far as talent is concerned, there will be such an excess that our artists will become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.
Hermann Hesse
The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.
David Gianadda
The only thing you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
Albert Einstein
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library
Albert Einstein
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
Albert Einstein
All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.
Paracelsus
...I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are.
Felix Salten
Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life. This thought matured in him slowly, and it was reflected in Vasudeva's old childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, and unity.
Hermann Hesse
For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant ... 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated Pauli, .... For Pauli the explanation of the number 137 was the test of a successful field theory, a test which no theory has passed up to now.
Charles P. Enz
The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to the use of the classical field concept)cannot bring us nearer to this goal. To reach it, we shall, presumably, have to pay with further revolutionary changes of the fundamental concepts of physics with a still farther digression from the concepts of the classical theories.
Wolfgang Pauli
In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.
Charles P. Enz
... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.
Wolfgang Pauli
...in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner.
M.L. von Franz
Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, "At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics." That testimony is particularly impressive if contrasted with Pauli's words less than five months later: "Heisenberg's type of mechanics has again given me hope and joy in life. To be sure it does not supply the solution to the riddle, but I believe it is again possible to march forward.
Wolfgang Pauli
The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)
Albert Einstein
...rather than ask why something happened (i.e. what caused it), Jung asked: What did it happen for? This same tendency appears in physics: Many modern physicists are now looking more for "connections" in nature than for causal laws (determinism).
M.L. von Franz
Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys—
Hermann Hesse
Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he'll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough.
Hermann Hesse
Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.
Karl Barth
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein
I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
Albert Einstein
I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions. and when the answer is simple, then God is answering.
Albert Einstein
What is difficult in training will become easy in a battle
Suvorov Alexander
You can never have for yourself someone who isn't on good terms with himself.
Pascal Mercier
You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself.
Hermann Hesse
Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)
Alain de Botton