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Quotes by German Authors
"Nowadays, however, we recognize that simultaneously with the typical case of a chemical reaction a typical case of catalytic effect had been studied which constitutes a limiting case."
"A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street."
"Fortunately, no country was ever more suited for anarchist agitation than present-day America."
"The solitary speaks."One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being."
"I don't like to eat the same dish every day, so I read very different things."
"The developing science departs at the same time more and more from its original scope and purpose and threatens to sacrifice its earlier unity and split into diverse branches."
"Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement."
"I was not a good scholar, and during my last year at school I made little effort. This was not due to laziness, but to a state of youthful day-dreaming and indifference that was only pierced when creative desire enveloped me like ether."
"After having been standing by the gate of the garden for a long time, Siddhartha realised that his desire was foolish, which had made him go up to this place, that he could not help his son, that he was not allowed to cling him. Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine."
"I've never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things."
"Even if I'm playing a superhero, it has to be steeped in reality."
"The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else and run away even before he comes near them the fly lights upon his very nose."
"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."
"An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led."
"I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom."
"The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them."
"The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."
"I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude - a feeling which increases with the years."
"Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed."
"Bless them that persecute you.' If our enemy cannot put up with us any longer and takes to cursing us, our immediate reaction must be to lift up our hands and bless him. Our enemies are the blessed of the Lord. Their curse can do us no harm. May their poverty be enriched with all the riches of God, with the blessing of Him whom they seek to oppose in vain. We are ready to endure their curses so long as they redound to their blessing."
"We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest."
"I don't believe, in the 21st century, in the balance of power system. This is a European idea of the 19th and 20th centuries."
"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate."
"Those who still think listening isn't an art should see if they can do it half as well."
"How seldom we weigh our neighbor in the same balance with ourselves."
"The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him."
"Time is that in which all things pass away."
"Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes."
"It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive."
"One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity."
"We really learn only from those books that we cannot judge. The author of a book that we were able to judge would have to learn from us."
"I meditate a lot, but I am constantly in pain. I'm trying to live with this. You just have to accept it."
"For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?"
"Who says I am not under the special protection of God?"
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