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Quotes by German Authors
"Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy."
"To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival."
"No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us."
"Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned."
"The art of leadership... consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention."
"Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life."
"Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied."
"We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking."
"The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night."
"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."
"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."
"Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
"The maturity of man-that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play."
"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."
"The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings."
"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."
"The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens."
"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."
"The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but you thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking."
"I need to hear what I am doing in order to create the next note. If I don't hear it then I can't feed myself."
"Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole."
"The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain."
"Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it."
"Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."
"Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it."
"Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all."
"Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself."
"Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."
"They are shooting The Thief Lord in Venice at the moment."
"Architecture begins where engineering ends."
"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."
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."
"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."
"We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance."
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