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Quotes by German Authors
"With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame- and something precious."
"There is nothing to opinions, theymay be beautiful or ugly, smart or foolish, everyone can support them ordiscard them. But the teachings, you've heard from me, are no opinion,and their goal is not to explain the world to those who seek knowledge.They have a different goal; their goal is salvation from suffering. This iswhat Gotama teaches, nothing else."
"In other times it may have been the business of Christianity to champion the equality of all men, its business today will be to defend passionately human dignity and reserve."
"They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."
"But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack."
"We don't get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like."
"The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed."
"Great sadnesses, they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent."
"The only source of knowledge is experience."
"The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey."
"Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax."
"What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own."
"God always takes the simplest way."
"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped."
"With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy."
"Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows."
"For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible."
"Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't comprehend. Don't ask for advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it."
"It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are."
"The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself."
"The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality."
"Every society requires mutual accommodation and mutually agreeable temper; hence the larger it is, the duller."
"When I put the shot, it's feminine, because I'm female. Athletic motion doesn't have a gender."
"One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him."
"At Night on the High SeasAt night, when the sea cradles meAnd the pale star gleamLies down on its broad waves,Then I free myself whollyFrom all activity and all the loveAnd stand silent and breathe purely,Alone, alone cradled by the seaThat lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights.Then I have to think of my friendsAnd my gaze sinks into their eyes,And I ask each one, silent and alone:"Are you still mine?Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death?Do you feel from my love, my grief,Just a breath, just an echo?"And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent,And smiles: NOAnd no greetings and no answers come from anywhere."
"A moral system valid for all is basically immoral."
"Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension."
"It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely."
"One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect."
"To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way, and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil."
"Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'."
"Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood."
"The more you let yourself go the less others let you go."
"The deepest and most sublime hatred is a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values-something whose like has never been seen on earth."
"In comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are hardly worth considering."
"When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be so!"
"Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege."
"Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too."
"You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'."
"If you have nothing to say for yourself then kindly keep your mouth shut!"
"What is important is not what someone is but what he is waiting for. Not the events of life but its possibilities."
"I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh."
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