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Quotes by German Authors
"Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?"
"Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob."
"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
"If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn."
"To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them."
"Belief in form but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming."
"There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity."
"Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them."
"Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly."
"In large States public education will always be extremely mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is at best only mediocre."
"Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those good things, withdraw from them the applause of the populace and discourage the spread of them, make them once more the concealed chastities of solitary souls, and say: morality is something forbidden! Perhaps you will thus attract to your cause the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the heroic. But then there must be something formidable in it, and not as hitherto something disgusting!"
"Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it."
"Christ is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality."
"I understand by 'freedom of spirit' something quite definite - the unconditional will to say No where it is dangerous to say No."
"The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies."
"Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?"
"There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths."
"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."
"Around the hero, everything becomes a tragedy.Around God, everything becomes what? a world?"
"What's foreign one can't always keep quite clear of,For good things, oft, are not so near;A German can't endure the French to see or hear of,Yet drinks their wines with hearty cheer."
"The man consummatig his life dies his death triumphantly,surrounded by men filled with hope and making solmn vows, thus one should learn to die.Friedrich Nietzsche - thus spoke zarathustra."
"The sedentary life...is the real sin against the holy spirit."
"The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture."
"Spirit? Who is that fellow? And where do you know him from? Is he perhaps not merely an arbitrary and convenient hypostasis that you have not even defined, let alone deduced or proved? Do you think you have an audience of old women in front of you?"
"Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil."
"One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless."
"If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I'd be glad, but all the same I'd look at it with a colder eye. I'd say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn't have to be today."
"The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?"
"A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?"
"Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will."
"Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had."
"Muoth was right. On growing old, one becomes more contented than in one's youth, which I will not therefore revile, for in all my dreams I hear my youth like a wonderful song which now sounds more harmonious than it did in reality, and even sweeter."
"Every talent must unfold itself in fighting."
"Here in this endless and gleaming wildernessI was removed farther than ever from the world of men --And I never saw so close and so clearlyThe image in the mirror of my own soul."
"NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life.preface to the second edition of "the world as will and representation."
"A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner, nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people."
"Here all fear of one another, all timidity about praying freely in one's own words in the presence of others may be put aside where in all simplicity and soberness the common, brotherly prayer is lifted to God by one of the brethren. But likewise all comment and criticism must cease whenever words of prayer howsoever halting are offered in the name of Jesus Christ. It is in fact the most normal thing in the common Christian life to pray together."
"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."
"Humor, motivations, moral,gods,energy,secrecy."
"Women can form a friendship with a man very well but to preserve it a slight physical antipathy most probably helps."
"The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting."
"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."
"The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection."
"Belief means not wanting to know what is true."
"That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens."
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