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Quotes by German Authors
"The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages."
"The joining of the whole congregation in prayer has something exceedingly solemn and affecting in it."
"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."
"The essential point of view of Christianity is sin."
"In the photographs themselves there's a definite contrast between the figures and the location - I like that kind of California backyard look; clapboard houses, staircases outdoors."
"The hatred Muslim extremists feel against the West feeds on certain conflicts in the world."
"The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force."
"I never smoked. I never drank and I never took drugs. The funny thing is, nothing is more boring, people like this. For me, it's OK. But most of my friends, at least they smoke and drink."
"But I think that sensitivity is also a good counsellor when it comes to enforcing one's interests."
"Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual."
"Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?"
"Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious."
"State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people."
"Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see."
"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of."
"When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began."
"Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye:I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch."
"Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry."
"When a human awakens to a great dream and throws the full force of his soul over it, all the universe conspires in your favor."
"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking."
"In the midst of the affliction He counsels, strengthens confirms, nourishes, and favors us.... More over, when we have repented, He instantly remits the sins as well as the punishments. In the same manner parents ought to handle their children."
"When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality."
"And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be."
"If you think your world isn't poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that's not because it's a dull world, that's because you're not poet enough to wake its soul up."
"Initially, the horrific images of September 11th triggered an enormous wave of solidarity."
"Life has become the ideology of its own absence."
"If I love you, what business is it of yours?"
"So to get back to being intimidated, yes, you get intimidated when you're on the runway with Naomi Campbell, who is the best runway model in the world."
"For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is."
"There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage."
"When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher."
"Global conditions are far too complex to be able to imagine that they could ever be really controlled by one power."
"I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect."
"We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible."
"Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them."
"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience."
"If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked."
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