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Quotes by German Authors
"As I sit down and start to work, I often panic. I stare at the empty piece of music paper. How can I say that my piece will be ready for performance next January when I do not have a recipe for making it happen?"
"I was out of my bed in one second, trembling with excitement, and I dashed to the door and into the adjoining room, where I could watch the streets below from the windows."
"Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it."
"The distinction between the old and the new formulations consisting in the incorporation of the concept of the rate of chemical reactions is so great that it immediately asserted itself in the objective development of catalysis."
"Depend on no man, on no friend but him who can depend on himself. He only who acts conscientiously toward himself, will act so toward others."
"The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason."
"Fresh activity is the only means of overcoming adversity."
"After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?"
"People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights."
"It has pleased no less than surprised me that of the many studies whereby I have sought to extend the field of general chemistry, the highest scientific distinction that there is today has been awarded for those on catalysis."
"Government must be a transparent garment which tightly clings to the people's body."
"Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals."
"This experience actually means the very opposite: the largest military power was unable to stop such a sensitive attack and will be unable to rule out such a possibility in the future. Precisely this is the background to the United States' military interventions."
"The other thing that has made playing live for me more enjoyable is the audience. I never knew I had such heartfelt, loving fans."
"Tear man out of his outward circumstances; and what he then is; that only is he."
"We have every interest in seeing that the military use of nuclear power will be contained."
"The military has been tremendously important in the past during catastrophes and in protecting the population. But it shouldn't become an auxiliary police force."
"And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over."
"Sometimes it's more important to be human, than to have good taste."
"By the fulfillment of my legal and moral duty I think I have earned punishment just as little as the tens of thousands of dutiful German officials who have now been imprisoned only because they carried out their duties."
"Just as invasion is the true and tried weapon in the hands of capital against the class struggle, so on the other hand the fearless pursuit of the class struggle has always proven the most effective preventative of foreign invasions."
"Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony."
"I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses."
"The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science."
"We took this challenge before our Lord and our conscience, and it must be done, because this man, Hitler, he is the ultimate evil."
"By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive."
"All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life."
"People are too durable, that's their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves, they last too long."
"Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction."
"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving."
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