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Quotes by German Authors
"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."
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."
"Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals."
"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."
"Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord."
"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."
"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?"
"We want our buildings to work like a machine that will create a pleasurable environment."
"In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame."
"The attitude of physiological psychology to sensations and feelings, considered as psychical elements, is, naturally, the attitude of psychology at large."
"Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone."
"The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play."
"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children."
"To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing."
"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."
"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."
"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."
"The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity."
"How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is."
"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."
"A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol."
"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied."
"But heat can also be produced by the friction of liquids, in which there could be no question of changes in structure, or of the liberation of latent heat."
"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."
"They make glorious shipwreck who are lost in seeking worlds."
"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."
"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."
"Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point."
"The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action."
"The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself."
"Wit is the epitaph of an emotion."
"First, I was Bavarian State Minister of Justice, and after the ministries of justice in the various states were dissolved I became Reich Minister without portfolio."
"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."
"Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world."
"The African is my brother but he is my younger brother by several centuries."
"Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity."
"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
"To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God."
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