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Quotes by German Authors
"A woman may very well form a friendship with a man but for this to endure it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy."
"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"
"One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed."
"There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane."
"A well-constituted human being, a 'happy one', must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness. Everything good is instinct-and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection."
"Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong again and again - the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer.... Darwin forgot the mind (- that in English): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind one must need mind - one loses it when one no longer needs it. He who possesses strength divests himself of mind."
"Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained."
"Either you reach a higher point today or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow."
"Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before."
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
"They're so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their foodso that their mouths learn howto eat fire!"
"None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it."
"Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts."
"Music heals all forms of misery."
"I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves."
"Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion."
"He who doesn't know how to put his will into things at least puts a meaning into them: that is, he believes there is a will in them already."
"A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things."
"A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves- and who want to go where I want to go."
"One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!"
"However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!"
"Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?"
"Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love; in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship."
"Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible."
"'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?"
"If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved."
"When virtue has slept she will get up more refreshed."
"Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind."
"In practice it is death that works soseductively behind the image of its brother, sleep."
"Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure."
"The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history."
"Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order."
"Examine the lives of the best and more fruitful men and peoples, and ask yourselves whether a tree, if it is to grow proudly into the sky, can do without bad weather and storms: whether unkindness and opposition from without, whether some sort of hatred, envy, obstinacy, mistrust, severity, greed and violence do not belong to the favouring circumstances without which a great increase even in virtue is hardly possible. The poison which destroys the weaker nature strengthens the stronger " and he does not call it poison, either."
"On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow."
"Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities."
"Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin."
"For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature.'A gift of life,' I responded, 'if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge of paradox leveled at it for things that are merely evidence of the fullness of its nature. One should love them.''Do you believe love is the strongest emotion?' he asked.'Do you know any stronger?''Yes, interest.''By which you probably mean a love that has been deprived of its animal warmth, is that it?''Let's agree on that definition!' he said with a laugh. 'Good night!'We had arrived again at the LeverkA1?4hn house, and he opened his front door."
"Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: 'What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?"
"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."
"Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance."
"In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him."
"The Diary of a Young Girl - This book fills you with sadness. I like this book."
"The person who fights monsters should make sure that in the process, he does not become a monster himself. Because when you stare down at an abyss, the abyss stares back at you."
"Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the 'Critical-Subjective,' where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's 'morally chaotic All."
"A thing can only live through a pious illusion."
"Love, too, has to be learned."
"To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity."
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