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Quotes by German Authors
"For many people who are so lost in their minds, so much involved in their thought processes, the only moments they have when they are not trapped in that is when they are relating to their animal, their pet."
"In its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away."
"Which government is the best? The one that teaches us to govern ourselves."
"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
"If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward."
"Music is the melody whose text is the world."
"They (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come."
"Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence."
"I am one thing, my writings are another."
"Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness."
"We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do."
"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."
"After your death you will be what you were before your birth."
"From one Soul of the Universe are all Souls derived."
"Ascetic: one who makes a necessity of virtue."
"Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments."
"If there were nothing but thought in you. You wouldn't even know your thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he's dreaming. You would be as identified with thought as a dreamer is with every image in the dream."
"What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!"
"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it."
"Truth is most beautiful undraped."
"But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. ---And we, who always think of happinessrising, would feel the emotionthat almost baffles uswhen a happy thing falls."
"As individuals express their life, so they are."
"So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?"
"Philosophical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from concepts mathematical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from the construction of concepts."
"The reason for my starting a diary is that I have no real friend."
"Only two things are infinite the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former."
"I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots."
"One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude."
"When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music ithout regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslims it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it."
"The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while."
"Peace cannot be kept by force it can only be achieved by understanding."
"Christian life consists of faith and charity."
"Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be."
"I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer."
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