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Quotes by German Authors
"Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone."
"I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time."
"Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it."
"Fresh activity is the only means of overcoming adversity."
"'God' - as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to."
"My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."
"If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts."
"There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance."
"The capitalists speculate on the two following factors: the female worker must be paid as poorly as possible and the competition of female labour must be employed to lower the wages of male workers as much as possible."
"The jealous are possessed by a mad devil and a dull spirit at the same time."
"This old Germany was partly defeated in its conflict with the progressive ideas of socialism, for it had given the people nothing that could serve as a successful alternative to socialism."
"This truth is a remedy against spiritual pride, namely, that none should account himself better before God than others, though perhaps adorned with greater gifts, and endowments."
"You can't do anything if a person says no. In such a case, there's nothing you can do - unlike the popular cliche that pressure is exerted, or that maybe an unwilling source is done away with."
"Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word."
"Now, there are a very large number of bodily movements, having their source in our nervous system, that do not possess the character of conscious actions."
"Even I had no opportunity to conduct very many concerts after World War II."
"Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer."
"Tear man out of his outward circumstances; and what he then is; that only is he."
"The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought."
"My parents found what I was interested in and encouraged me. They didn't put me in front of a television and buy lots of toys, the way some American parents do."
"By the fulfillment of my legal and moral duty I think I have earned punishment just as little as the tens of thousands of dutiful German officials who have now been imprisoned only because they carried out their duties."
"As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression."
"Acting is all about truth and honesty, and the sensitivity that's capable of transporting you."
"There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas."
"Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss."
"It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most persevering researches."
"When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable."
"But not you, O girl, nor yet his mother,stretched his eyebrows so fierce with expectation.Not for your mouth, you who hold him now,did his lips ripen into these fervent contours.Do you really think your quiet footstepscould have so convulsed him, you who move like dawn wind?True, you startled his heart; but older terrorsrushed into him with that first jolt to his emotions.Call him . . . you'll never quite retrieve him from those dark consorts.Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved, he makes a homein your familiar heart, takes root there and begins himself anew.But did he ever begin himself?"
"Never to talk of oneself is a form of hypocrisy."
"Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'"
"The citizen parties, by an absolute majority, elected a National Socialist Government."
"Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them."
"Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction."
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