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Quotes by German Authors
"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough."
"To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach."
"Any debate among politicians about monetary policy is counterproductive."
"International socialism recognizes the right of free independent nations, with equal rights."
"Europe itself is an embodiment of this diversity."
"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming."
"It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us."
"Life is the dancer and you are the dance."
"The great rule of moral conduct is next to God, respect time."
"On the other hand, ethnic psychology must always come to the assistance of individual psychology, when the developmental forms of the complex mental processes are in question."
"When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so."
"Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means."
"How should we be able to forget those myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
"Temporarily in 1934 I became a department head in the German Labor Front and dealt with the improvement of labor conditions in German factories. Then I was in charge of public works on the staff of Hess. I gave up both these activities in 1941."
"I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be."
"If everyone would look for that uniqueness then we would have a very colorful world."
"Everyone once once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again."
"Freedom and Justice are twin sisters."
"I am bound by conscience and the word of God. Therefore I can and will recant nothing, because to act against one's conscience is neither safe nor salutary. Here I stad. I can do no ether. So help me God."
"There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there's no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime."
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
"I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible."
"Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes ennui of the higher ones."
"I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style."
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
"An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge , purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress and the descendants would be fully justified in rejecting those decrees as having been made in an unwarranted and malicious manner.."
"The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions."
"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."
"Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves."
"The world admires wealth and velocity-these are the things for which everyone strives. Railroads, the post, steamboats, and all possible modes of communication are the means by which the world overeducates itself and freezes itself in mediocrity."
"A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center."
"The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward."
"No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit."
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