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Quotes by German Authors
"How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it."
"And while he compared all these things which he was seeing with his eyes to the mental pictures he had painted of them in his homesickness, it became clear to him that he was, after all, destined to be a poet, and he saw that in poets' dreams reside a beauty and enchantment that one seeks in vain in the things of the real world."
"Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold?"
"There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be."
"It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst."
"There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
"I would not think that philosophy and reason themselves will be man's guide in the foreseeable future; however, they will remain the most beautiful sanctuary they have always been for the select few."
"In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified."
"Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences."
"As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself."
"Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority-- where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;-- exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense."
"I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage."
"And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us."
"The limits of my language are the limits of my universe."
"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."
"When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences--their insignificant, everyday experiences--so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others--and how many there are!--are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much."
"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book."
"A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them."
"The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together."
"His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world."
"He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity-proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive-a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?"
"For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing."
"Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours."
"Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance."
"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
"We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know. When my mother says to me 'dear boy,' it means much more than when another uses it."
"A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is."
"Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized."
"Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads."
"Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral."
"I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his "divine service.""
"God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?"
"All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life."
"There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over."
"A promise to love someone forever, then, means, 'As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.' Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one's fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same."
"The doctor of the future will be oneself."
"Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract."
"Imagination is the highest form of research."
"An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind."
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