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Quotes by German Authors
"Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye:I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch."
"Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it."
"Reason deserves to be called a prophet for in showing up the consequence and effect of our actions in the present does it not tell us what the future will be?"
"In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods."
"What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them."
"But quite honestly, personally, I was much more concerned - I mean, there's not much I can do about my appearance obviously other than spending four hours in hair and makeup."
"The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens."
"You should not believe your conscience and your feelings more than the word which the Lord who receives sinners preaches to you."
"Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world."
"Thus every matter, if it is to be done well, calls for the attention of the whole person."
"This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career."
"The happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering from positive evil."
"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
"Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance."
"In a man-to-man fight, the winner is he who has one more round in his magazine."
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
"They make revolutionary propaganda because they know the privileged class can never be overturned peacefully."
"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live."
"The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass."
"And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good."
"Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it."
"Depression is something that makes you lose your sight."
"No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes."
"Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes."
"Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience."
"I ordered gold in the meantime to be showered down without ceasing among the happy multitude."
"Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed."
"He [Christ] died for me. He made His righteousness mine and made my sin His own; and if He made my sin His own, then I do not have it, and I am free."
"To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment."
"One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity."
"It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect - a process which occurs in every dialectical victory - you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one's own advantage. - Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as "Death before dishonour, and so on."
"Physiology seeks to derive the processes in our own nervous system from general physical forces, without considering whether these processes are or are not accompanied by processes of consciousness."
"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
"The defects of a preacher are soon spied."
"Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.And without feet I can make my way to you,without a mouth I can swear your name.Break off my arms, I'll take hold of youwith my heart as with a hand.Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.And if you consume my brain with fire,I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood."
"It is sometimes tougher to fight my superiors than the French."
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