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Quotes by German Authors

"How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is."

"Love is blind friendship closes its eyes."

"The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity."

"Let This Darkness Be a Bell TowerQuiet friend who has come so far,feel how your breathing makes more space around you.Let this darkness be a bell towerand you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.Move back and forth into the change.What is it like, such intensity of pain?If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.In this uncontainable night,be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,the meaning discovered there.And if the world has ceased to hear you,say to the silent earth: I flow.To the rushing water, speak: I am."

"If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?"

"We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us."

"To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious."

"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."

"Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned."

"To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God."

"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion."

"I've been to Paris France and I've been to Paris Paramount. Paris Paramount is better."

"Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists."

"How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?"

"A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling."

"Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says 'All for me' is a horror to us."

"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."

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."

"Education is the art of making man ethical."

"The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain."

"To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness."

"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."

"Thus we have at least a national song that unites all Germans, and is the symbol of our sixty-million nation."

"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."

"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."

"Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time-past and future-the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is."

"Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle."

"Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of positive reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited."

"Life is simply the reification of the process of living."

"There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence."

"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."

"Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes."

"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

"Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."

"The real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development."

"One in three all friends are:Brothers in distress,equals facing rivals,free men - facing death!"

"The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action."
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