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Quotes by German Authors
"Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!"
"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."
"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."
"But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only."
"All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention."
"In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame."
"Today we are searching for things in nature that are hidden behind the veil of appearance... We look for and paint this inner, spiritual side of nature."
"Freedom can occur only through education."
"Women are still cats and birds. Or at the best, cows."
"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."
"It is to be hoped that the leaders of this movement will place the nation above the party."
"The maturity of man-that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play."
"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."
"The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play."
"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."
"Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest."
"Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not."
"Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals."
"Pride is the direct appreciation of oneself."
"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."
"Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns."
"Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar."
"Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences."
"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."
"If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?"
"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied."
"The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself."
"Wit is the epitaph of an emotion."
"It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation."
"There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena."
"The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."
"Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone."
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."
"To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there."
"Optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity."
"I am not an expert in this field but I do try to keep up to date with the Bundesliga. And I do follow World Cups and European Championships more closely."
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