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Quotes by German Authors
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
"Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!"
"The discerning one walketh amongst men as amongst animals."
"We are noble, good, beautiful, and happy!"
"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."
"Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time."
"Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time? Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?"
"The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time."
"Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people."
"You can deceive yourself with truth too. That's an even more dangerous dream."
"Whoever does not have a good father should procure one."
"Possibly the apparent relapse they had suffered was not a fall and a cause for suffering, but a leap forward and a positive act."
"Energy wasted on negative ends."
"There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course."
"It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to keep it."
"When someone is searching." said Siddhartha, "then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher,because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don't see, which are directly in front of your eyes."
"A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection."
"Moments are the elements of profit."
"There is no guilt in feelings ever."
"Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once I."
"It is only through love that we can attain to communion with God. All living knowledge of God rest upon this foundation: that we experience Him in our lives as Will-to-love."
"I am superior to you only in one point: I'm awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them."
"That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen."
"There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight."
"Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another."
"Man is the cruelest animal."
"True human progress is based less on the inventive mind than on the conscience of such men as Brandeis."
"By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week."
"Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."
"The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to."
"I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing."
"What is my life if I am no longer useful to others."
"Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes."
"He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts."
"The golden proportion is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult to produce and the good easy."
"With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet."
"Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side."
"Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old."
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
"And if we ask how are we to know where our hearts are, the answer is just as simple - everything which hinders us from loving God above all things and acts as a barrier between ourselves and our obedience to Jesus is our treasure, and the place where our heart is."
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