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Quotes by German Authors
"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding."
"In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity."
"Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain."
"The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite."
"The reason why I have survived as long as I have survived is what my friends, comrades and supporters thought was an extraordinarily cautious approach."
"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms " in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."
"To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts."
"Women are still cats and birds. Or at the best, cows."
"One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited."
"The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."
"All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention."
"To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me."
"Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority."
"We must prepare the ground for creativity. And if this also gives rise later to success in the economic sense, success in terms of Euros and Cents, this will by no means reduce my joy."
"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."
"At the World Cup and even now at the Confederations Cup, our security provisions will ensure the greatest level of protection possible for all those participating - both inside and outside the stadiums."
"Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest."
"Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences."
"Freedom can occur only through education."
"There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena."
"I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen."
"I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature."
"What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal."
"But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only."
"The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason."
"Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy."
"The maturity of man-that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play."
"My landlady, who is only a tailor's widow, reads her Milton; and tells me, that her late husband first fell in love with her on this very account: because she read Milton with such proper emphasis."
"Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman."
"Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns."
"Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding."
"You must, in studying Nature, always consider both each single thing and the whole: nothing is inside and nothing is outside, for what is within is without. Make haste, then, to grasp this holy mystery which is public knowledge.Rejoice in the true illusion, in the serious game: no living thing is a unity, it is always manifold."
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