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Quotes by German Authors

"Depression is something that makes you lose your sight."

"One must not forget that recovery is brought about not by the physician, but by the sick man himself. He heals himself, by his own power, exactly as he walks by means of his own power, or eats, or thinks, breathes or sleeps."

"The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge."

"Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit."

"I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be."

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

"The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism."

"Everybody is talking today about the economy."

"The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification."

"One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons."

"The development of a rational view of the nature of catalysis was thus absolutely dependent on the creation of the concept of the rate of chemical reaction."

"I ordered gold in the meantime to be showered down without ceasing among the happy multitude."

"To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin."

"In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations."

"Whoever looks at America will see: the ship is powered by stupidity, corruption, or prejudice."

"For capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business."

"From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past."

"My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary."

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups parties nations and epochs it is the ru)e."

"Without democracy there is no freedom. Violence, no matter who is using it, is always reactionary."

"We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare."

"There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly."

"There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there's no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime."

"What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them."

"The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will."

"So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused."

"Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first."

"How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do."

"It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect - a process which occurs in every dialectical victory - you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one's own advantage. - Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as "Death before dishonour, and so on."

"Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity."

"I am prejudiced in favor of him who, without impudence, can ask boldly. He has faith in humanity, and faith in himself. No one who is not accustomed to giving grandly can ask nobly and with boldness."

"Glib tongues frill up their hash of knowledgefor mankind in polished speechesthat are no more than vaporous windsrustling the fallen leaves in autumn."

"Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this."

"Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world."

"It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy."

"A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center."

"What is it: is man only a blunder of God or God only a blunder of man?"

"What light is to the outer physical world intellect is to the inner world of consciousness. For intellect is related to the will, and thus also to the organism which is nothing other than will regarded objectively, in the approximate same way as light is to a combustible body and the oxygen in combination with which it ignites."

"People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart."

"Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing."
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