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Quotes by German Authors
"The sound is the key; audiences will accept visual discontinuity much more easily than they'll accept jumps in the sound. If the track makes sense, you can do almost anything visually."
"For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness."
"Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized."
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don't ask, walk!"
"I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution."
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are."
"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."
"Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own."
"The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure."
"It is easy to give advice from a port of safety."
"I believe in intuitions and inspirations...I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am."
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form."
"By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man."
"Man made God in his own image."
"Say not you know another entirely till you have divided an inheritance with him."
"Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing."
"Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race."
"In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods."
"I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body."
"Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost."
"Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman."
"The last thing you want to do, unless it's a very unusual situation, is to invest money."
"One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior."
"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred."
"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason."
"Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up."
"Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity."
"What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?"
"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."
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
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