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Quotes by German Authors
"All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take."
"The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error."
"What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering..."
"Better know nothing than half-know many things."
"We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary."
"What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!"
"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?"
"What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?"
"Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital."
"If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs."
"Sleep knocks on my eyes: they grow heavy. Sleep touches my mouth: it stays open.Truly, he comes to me on soft soles, the dearest of thieves, and steals my thoughts from me."
"Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!"
"The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary."
"We wander through this life together in a semi-darkness in which none of us can distinguish exactly the features of his neighbour. Only from time to time through some experience that we have of our companion or through some remark that he passes he stands for a moment close to us as though illuminated by a flash of lightning. Then we see him as he really is."
"This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being."
"The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive."
"I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength."
"I look back upon my youth and realize how so many people gave me help, understanding, courage " very important things to me " and they never knew it. They entered into my life and became powers within me. All of us live spiritually by what others have given us, often unwittingly, in the significant hours of our life. At the time these significant hours may not even be perceived. We may not recognize them until years later when we look back, as one remembers some long-ago music or a boyhood landscape. We all owe to others much of the gentleness and wisdom that we have made our own; and we may well ask ourselves what will others owe to us."
"Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother."
"A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory."
"Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself - ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself."
"The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises."
"We don't act like that because we are in good humor we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces."
"Sometimes, you have to love beyond yourself! And that's how you learn to love! That's why you had to drink the bitter glass of your love."
"When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us."
"Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes - who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge."
"Sleep makes the silence and the terrible fear go by more quickly, helps pass the time, since it's impossible to kill."
"If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries."
"We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word."
"I prefer to make up my own quotes and attribute them to very smart people, so that I can use them to win arguments."
"There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing."
"If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it."
"It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around."
"You can do what you will: but at each given moment of your life you can will only one determined thing and by no means anything other than this one."
"The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day."
"When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one."
"There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again."
"The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality."
"What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind."
"Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist's nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences."
"What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness."
"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another."
"Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere."
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