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Quotes by German Authors
"One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve."
"We will not send troops. Germany is not committed to Iraq - we will not commit ourselves with troops."
"Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other."
"It is true what Rimbaud said; If you think a book is strong enough, try it at the ocean, in the wind, at the waves. If the book can resist the ocean, then it exists. Otherwise, throw it away."
"For the sake of our interests, as well as of our honour and dignity, we were obliged to see that we won for our international policy the same independence that we had secured for our European policy."
"You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame."
"If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special."
"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing."
"Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion."
"The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace."
"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."
"The individual organs follow the same pattern as the whole organism, i.e. they have their period of growth, of stationary, maximum activity and then of aging decline."
"Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from."
"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science."
"What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" has identified with."
"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
"You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion."
"Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist."
"The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever it has to make an important decision."
"Whether a revolution succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it."
"I was elected to the Diet in the same way as at every parliamentary election."
"On the other hand, all kinds of adventurous schemes to add security checkpoints to subway and bus systems have been circulating since the London attacks. This is nonsense. No one can guaranty 100 percent security."
"I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind."
"As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins."
"The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others."
"Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist."
"Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment."
"Secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transition stadium between being and not-being."
"No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas."
"To walk behind others on a road you are traveling together, to give precedence to others without envy - this is painful for an individual and painful for a nation."
"Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
"As soon as by one's own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one's own right is laid."
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