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Quotes by German Authors
"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."
"Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day."
"If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction."
"We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created."
"A complete sharing between two people is an impossibility and whenever it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a mutual agreement which robs either one member or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that, even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!"
"In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare."
"Reason deserves to be called a prophet for in showing up the consequence and effect of our actions in the present does it not tell us what the future will be?"
"The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. 'Behold, just now the world became perfect!'-thus thinks every woman when she obeys out of entire love. And women must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. Man's disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it."
"Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now."
"The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple."
"Do not shorten the morning by getting up late look upon it as the quintessence of life and to a certain extent sacred."
"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."
"Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be achieved by understanding."
"When man lives under government, he is fallen, his worth is gone, and his nature tarnished."
"To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics."
"When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated."
"The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives."
"How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments."
"I could only speak in the smallest, most intimate circles about the real reasons which made me undertake the changeover of the plants for certain lines of production for I had to expect that many people would not understand me."
"We know from daily life that we exist for other people first of all, for whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends."
"Thus every matter, if it is to be done well, calls for the attention of the whole person."
"Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves."
"Is it sin, which makes the worm a chrysalis, and the chrysalis a butterfly, and the butterfly dust?"
"The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god."
"Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!"
"True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves."
"One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life."
"Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality."
"Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;and without any feet can go to you;and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.Break off my arms, I shall take hold of youand grasp you with my heart as with a hand;arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;and if you set this brain of mine afire,upon my blood I then will carry you."
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
"Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction."
"One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured."
"The presentation of the Golden Badge of the Movement is the highest honor the Third Reich has to offer."
"We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness."
"We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity... But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me."
"Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers."
"Once you have invented a character with three dimensions and a voice, you begin to realize that some of the things you'd like him to do to further your plot are things that such a person wouldn't, or couldn't, do."
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