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Quotes by German Authors
"Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost."
"They walked, and the long waves rolled and murmured rhythmically beside them; the fresh salty wind blew free and unobstructed in their faces, wrapped itself around their ears, and made them feel slightly numb and deliciously dizzy. They walked along in that wide, peaceful, whispering hush of the sea that gives every sound, near or far, some mysterious importance."
"[A]t bottom it is the same with traveling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the things we see and read make an impression on the mind before they are forgotten, and so contribute to its formation and nurture."
"One is punished most for one's virtues."
"A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship."
"The final reward of the dead - to die no more."
"No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others."
"His very chains helped to deceive him about the harshness of his service."
"Each one sees what he carries in his heart."
"The revolutionary Mozart is the Mozart of his last eight years."
"A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden."
"Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard."
"Indeed science alone may perhaps be sterile when pursued without an understanding of the world in which scientific knowledge is created and in which the fruits of science are used."
"There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age."
"The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour."
"You can't, if you can't feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You'll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other's scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration's to your taste,But you'll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart's space."
"There are no arbitrary constants ... nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory)."
"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better."
"One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one."
"If somewhere deep within me arises some essenceof having been a child, one I never experienced,perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,I don't want to know it. Without even looking,I want to form an angel out of itand hurl him into the foremost rankof screaming angels, to remind God."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
"Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life."
"Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see."
"He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog."
"While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser."
"Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilization in high boots."
"Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever."
"All men are somewhat ridiculous and grotesque, just because they are men; and in this respect artists might well be regarded as man multiplied by two. So it is, was, and shall be."
"The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves."
"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."
"By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive."
"If I know what love is, it is because of you."
"What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and work flow."
"No one can believe how powerful prayer is and what it can effect, except those who have learned it by experience. Whenever I have prayed earnestly, I have been heard and have obtained more than I prayed for. God sometimes delays, but He always comes."
"I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die."
"Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse."
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