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Quotes by German Authors
"The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes."
"Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders."
"There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don't ask, walk!"
"The other thing that has made playing live for me more enjoyable is the audience. I never knew I had such heartfelt, loving fans."
"They have accorded me my constitutional rights, and that is to their credit because the media hate campaign against me has been so intense and so vicious that it's a miracle that the police have taken such a professional approach."
"What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition."
"To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years."
"If you are in a band like my brother, Rudolf, who is in the Scorpions, then you have a kind of umbrella and you cover each other. You have five people to discuss things with and you are all in the same boat, and therefore make much wiser choices."
"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom."
"Experience is a good school. But the fees are high."
"Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong: it is a geographical expression."
"No plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy."
"And therefore we must seek dialogue in this networked world. We must ask which voice was actually attempting to make itself heard and saw no other possibility of gaining a hearing. To that extent, for a while this also represented a forced opening of a cosmopolitan view."
"I set about seeking a thread, a theme, a style, in the realm of legend. Something that might allow me to give free rein to my juvenile sense of romanticism and the beautiful image."
"You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level."
"All of us, who are members of the Germanic peoples, can be happy and thankful that once in thousands of years fate has given us, from among the Germanic peoples, such a genius, a leader, our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, and you should be happy to be allowed to work with us."
"Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension."
"In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the experimental proof for the interdependence of the composition and properties of chemical compounds resulted in the theory that they are mutually related, so that like composition governs like properties, and conversely."
"I like today and perhaps a little future still, but the past is really something I'm not interested in. So, as far as I'm concerned, I like only the past of things and people I don't know. When I know, I don't care because I knew how it was."
"In my view the structure of the whole atom was that of an individual, with all its parts interconnected, and the emission of a spectral line appeared to me to be the result of the coherence and co-operation of several electric quanta."
"One does not only wish to be understood when one writes, one wishes just as surely not to be understood."
"As a consequence of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the officer corps of the old army became part of this class, as did that part of the younger generation who, in the old Germany, would have become officers or civil servants."
"I was a student in Germany when Hitler came to power."
"The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing."
"An unconscious consciousness is no more a contradiction in terms than an unseen case of seeing."
"Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems."
"Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought."
"We can no longer apply the classic criteria to clearly determine whether and when we should use military force. We are waging war in Afghanistan, for example, but it's an asymmetrical war where the enemies are criminals instead of soldiers."
"Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt."
"You have to protect yourself, your body, your being. You cannot treat it badly; you have to keep it, make as sensitive as possible."
"It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell - 'voluntarily' sell - himself every day and hour to the 'beast of property.'"
"Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others."
"He who loves with purity considers not the gift of the lover, but the love of the giver."
"Through the present moment, you have access to the power of life itself, that which has traditionally been called "God." As soon as you turn away from it, God ceases to be a reality in your life, and all you are left with is the mental concept of God, which some people believe in and others deny. Even belief in God is only a poor substitute for the living reality of God manifesting every moment of your life."
"The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."
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