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Quotes by German Authors
"The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others."
"Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only 'Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?' Where you cannot it is to be rejected..."
"By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are."
"Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life."
"There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring."
"Qualsiasi uomo notevole, chiunque cioA non appartenga a quei 5/6 dell'umanitA dotati tanto miseramente dalla natura, rimarrA dopo i quarant'anni difficilmente esente da una certa traccia di misantropia."
"We're all a genius, but If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
"For nothing is more democratic than logic, it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses."
"No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed."
"No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes."
"When I was five years old, my parents gave me a magic chest. I learned to cast spells, although of a childish kind, before I had learned to read and write."
"The word of man is the most durable of all material."
"He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart."
"Most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth."
"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
"One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth."
"A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul."
"The only people who attain power are those who crave it."
"The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art."
"The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death-we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."
"This consists in not taking a book into one's hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time - such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind."
"Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."
"The soul passeth from form to form; and the mansions of her pilgrimage are manifold."
"You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else."
"Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures."
"Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke."
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
"Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere."
"Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing."
"As far as the laws of Mathematics refer to reality they are not certain and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality."
"A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent."
"The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth."
"Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal."
"The Christian life is participation in the encounter of Christ with the world."
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
"The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax."
"We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack."
"In this world one is seldom reduced to make a selection between two alternatives. There are as many varieties of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline nose and a flat one."
"What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself."
"I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore."
"Gracious Providence, to whom I owe all my powers, why didst thou not withhold some of those blessings I possess, and substitute in their place a feeling of self-confidence and contentment?"
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