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Quotes by German Authors
"Mind isn't as serious as my mind makes it out to be."
"All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own."
"After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might."
"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."
"Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought."
"Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced."
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."
"If we were to suppose that mankind never can or will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all."
"He who would know the world must first manufacture it."
"Even more remote from his way of thinking, even more impossible than any other thought, would have been words such as this: "Is it only I alone who have created this experience, or is it objective reality? Does the Master have the same feelings as I, or would mine amuse him? Are my thoughts new, unique, my own, or have the Master and many before him experienced and thought exactly the same? No, for him there were no such analyses and differentiations. Everything was reality, was steeped in reality, full of it as bread dough is of yeast."
"I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart."
"Creativity is the residue of time wasted."
"Don't wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success."
"God is clever but not dishonest."
"Satan, the god of all dissension stirs up daily new sects. And last of all which of all others I should have foreseen or once suspected. He has raised up a sect such as teach that men should not be terrified by the Law but gently exhorted by the preaching of the grace of Christ."
"A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation."
"All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down."
"All geniuses are peculiarly inclined to solitude, to which they are driven as much by their difference from others as the inner wealth with which they are quipped, since among humans, among diamonds, only the uncommonly great are suited as solitaires: the ordinary ones must be set in clusters to produce any effect."
"Nature generally in the distribution of her capacities has adapted the means to the endso nature's true destination must be to produce a will, not merely good as a means to something else, but good in itself, for which reason wasimparted to us as a practicalabsolutely necessaryfaculty."
"Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection."
"He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home."
"The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition."
"The heart overflows with gladness, and leaps and dances for the joy it has found in God. In this experience the Holy Spirit is active, and has taught us in the flash of a moment the deep secret of joy. You will have as much joy and laughter in life as you have faith in God."
"Thus God's work and His eyes are in the depths, but man's only in the height."
"The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this."
"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace."
"Gaiety alone as it were is the hard cash of happiness everything else is just a promissory note."
"Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings."
"Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!"
"If only they would not look at one so-What great misery can be in two such small spots, no bigger than a man's thumb-in their eyes!"
"What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes."
"We breathed the air of freedom without knowing the language or any person."
"Must it so be that whatever makes man happy must later become the source of his misery?"
"Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent."
"Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback set it up on one side and it tumbles over on the other."
"It is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."
"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs."
"There was always a screen behind which one could hide- a superior who in turn had his superior- orders, instructions, duties, commands- and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called- there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity."
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