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Quotes by German Authors
"Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being."
"All that is transitory is but a metaphor."
"The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality."
"God can make a new beginning with people whenever God pleases, but not people with God. Therefore, people cannot make a new beginning at all; they can only pray for one. Where people are on their own and live by their own devices, there is only the old, the past."
"Play is the highest form of research."
"So when the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: "I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!"
"We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness."
"Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness."
"Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength."
"Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are."
"Youth ends when egotism does, maturity begins when one lives for others."
"The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing."
"Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances."
"It is in trifles and when he is off his guard that a man best shows his character."
"Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting."
"Moral instruction, although containing much that is convincing for the reason, accomplisheslittlebecause the teachers themselves have not got their own notions clear, and when they endeavor to make up for this by raking up motives of moral goodness from every quarter, trying to make their physic right strong, they spoil it."
"We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving."
"But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
"Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them."
"Pride ... is the direct appreciation of oneself."
"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."
"The story of the herd of seals. Hundreds of them on a beach; among them the hunter killing one after the other with a club. Together they could easily have crushed him- but they lay there, watching him come to murder, and did not move; he was only killing a neighbor- one neighbor after the other. The story of the European seals. The sunset of civilization. Tired shapeless Götterdämmerung. The empty banners of human rights. The sell-out of a continent. The onrushing deluge. The haggling for the last prices. The old dance of despair on the volcano. Peoples again slowly being driven into a slaughterhouse. The fleas would save themselves when the sheep were being sacrificed. As always."
"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men living and dead and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received."
"If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him."
"Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment. It is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego."
"You had an image of life inside you, a belief or an ideal, that you were ready to do good deeds, to suffer, and to sacrifice " and by degrees you noticed that the world had no need of your good deeds, or sacrifices, and such like; that life was not an heroic tale, with roles for heroes, and such like, but a comfortable bourgeois parlour, where one is perfectly satisfied with eating and drinking, coffee and knitted stockings, tarot readings and music on the radio. And he who wants otherwise and has the heroic and the beautiful inside him, the veneration of great poets or the adoration of saints inside him, he is a fool and a knight errant, a latter day Don Quixote?"
"If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of doubts of my own."
"The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden."
"Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."
"I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance."
"My past life is abundantly full of God's mercy, and, above all sin, stands the forgiving love of the Crucified."
"Each one's no longer consciousOf the high wall, or the rest:Since the one enduring fortress,Is the soldier's iron breast.If you'd live unconquered,Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:Every wife an Amazon bred,And every child a hero."
"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."
"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
"If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different."
"At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed."
"We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets."
"I see my life in terms of music."
"Die before you die and find that there is no death."
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