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Quotes by German Authors
"The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak."
"This is the creature there has never been.They never knew it, and yet, none the less,they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.Not there, because they loved it, it behavedas though it were. They always left some space.And in that clear unpeopled space they savedit lightly reared its head, with scarce a traceof not being there. They fed it, not with corn,but only with the possibilityof being. And that was able to confersuch strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.within the silver mirror and in her."
"The people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations."
"Faith is a living and unshakable confidence a belief in the grace of God so assured that a man would die a thousand deaths for its sake."
"Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved."
"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail."
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
"Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity."
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it."
"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."
"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick."
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination."
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."
"What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion."
"It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ."
"And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it."
"It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself."
"The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become."
"The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw."
"I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true."
"A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything."
"And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall."
"Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them."
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
"Something deeply hidden had to be behind things."
"Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time which explains why young years pass slowly while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course."
"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden."
"As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art."
"Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference."
"Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced."
"Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all Gods and backworlds."
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