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Quotes by German Authors
"God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own."
"Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence."
"Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences."
"Lose not yourself in a far off time, seize the moment that is thine."
"The concentration and reciprocal effect of industry and agriculture conjoin in a growth of productive powers, which increases more in geometrical than in arithmetical proportion."
"What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures."
"They show that roughly two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their illness, whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not."
"We shall have to pass through many a valley, many a narrow defile. Many will grow tired on the way. Of course they will mostly be those who have no reason to do so."
"Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond."
"Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason."
"I'm very surprised at that, yes, because there were many chances for it to be in Germany once the syndication market started and it continually just did not happen."
"How happy I am to go to the front at last. To do my bit. To prove with my life what I think I feel."
"He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals."
"Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."
"Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been."
"The United States is our most important ally. They helped us many times. Without the United States, the unification or German democratisation after the Nazi period would have been much more complicated, or almost impossible."
"The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not."
"You have very accurately described the difficulty of presenting my books on film: many of my characters are alone most of the time, and when they do talk, what they say is mostly lies. That can make for a pretty confusing film."
"I prefer playing in the studio because you have much more control over things."
"The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."
"Ladies and gentlemen, on the occasion of my election I received many letters from people representing all segments of the population and all professions, especially from the younger generation, linking my inauguration with great - far too great - expectations."
"I never smoked. I never drank and I never took drugs. The funny thing is, nothing is more boring, people like this. For me, it's OK. But most of my friends, at least they smoke and drink."
"The plan shows that the twenty million people in the German democratic Republic and in the democratic sector of Berlin think only of peace, and that they are working for freedom and peaceful prosperity."
"We thrust our fingers into our ears to stop its moan; but it was no good; the cry cut like a drill into our heads, dragging minutes into hours, hours into years. We withered and grew old between those cries."
"One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual."
"...the opposite of every truth is just as true! That is to say, any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything that can be thought with the mind and said with words is one-sided, it's all just the half of it, lacking completeness, roundness, or unity."
"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."
"It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive."
"Is anarchism desirable? Well, who does not seek freedom? What man, unless willing to declare himself in bondage, would care to call any control agreeable? Think about it!"
"I'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work."
"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand."
"Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal."
"As freely as the firmament embraces the world, or the sun pours forth impartially his beams, so mercy must encircle both friend and foe."
"Freedomis a property of all rational beings."
"Having children is what a woman is born for, really."
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