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Quotes by German Authors
"A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?"
"The Church today is more likely to alienate than to seduce..."
"If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation."
"The man of science is a poor philosopher."
"What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self."
"Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?...Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!"
"The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment."
"If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do."
"He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness."
"Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live."
"In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?"
"It is easier to bear the worries of wandering than to find peace in your hometown, where only the sage can live in a happy house surrounded by trite troubles and daily distractions."
"Some of them will, but most of them are willed. Some of them are genuine, but most of them are bad actors."
"These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do."
"It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right."
"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."
"The relatives of a suicide always take it in bad part that he did not remain alive out of consideration for the family dignity."
"What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?"
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."
"There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there."
"But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing."
"To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away."
"Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence."
"What is Genius?- To aspire to a lofty aim and to will the means to that aim."
"Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain."
"Desires are not killed by fulfilling them."
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced."
"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good."
"Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen."
"I understand you well. Now we have no need to dispute: you are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, the difference between men akin to their father and those who take their destiny from a woman; the difference between spirit and intellect."
"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
"Profundity of thought belongs to youth clarity of thought to old age."
"The future influences the present just as much as the past."
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."
"The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him."
"We ought to face our destiny with courage."
"Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love."
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