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Quotes by German Authors
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
"I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature."
"All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention."
"To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing."
"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."
"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?"
"If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer."
"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."
"For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child."
"The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play."
"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."
"The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action."
"The attitude of physiological psychology to sensations and feelings, considered as psychical elements, is, naturally, the attitude of psychology at large."
"The maturity of man-that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play."
"Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences."
"What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven."
"Everything depends therefore on encountering thought at its source. Such thought is the reality of man's being, which achieved consciousness and understanding of itself through it."
"The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself."
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."
"Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding."
"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."
"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
"Man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends."
"To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God."
"But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only."
"All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many."
"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."
"No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite."
"Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals."
"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."
"A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling."
"Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man.Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society.But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money."
"Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not."
"Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work."
"They make glorious shipwreck who are lost in seeking worlds."
"There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena."
"Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction."
"Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone."
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