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Quotes by German Authors
"Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm."
"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."
"Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle."
"You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame."
"If you know the why, you can live any how."
"So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's."
"Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion."
"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming."
"Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical."
"Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."
"The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it."
"Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside."
"In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space an time, but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness."
"I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it."
"Everything depends on whether we have for opponents those French tricksters or those daring rascals, the English. I prefer the English. Frequently their daring can only be described as stupidity. In their eyes it may be pluck and daring."
"It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so."
"Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle."
"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."
"Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors."
"Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within."
"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."
"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.'"
"How happy I am to go to the front at last. To do my bit. To prove with my life what I think I feel."
"Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination."
"He who loves with purity considers not the gift of the lover, but the love of the giver."
"Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions."
"The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."
"Serious illness doesn't bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host."
"No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order."
"Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth."
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
"I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen."
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