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Quotes by German Authors
"Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes peoples and sucks their blood like a vampire."
"I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language."
"What is emitted from the divine, though it be only like the reflection from the fire, still has the divine reality in itself, and one might almost ask what were the fire without glow, the sun without light, or the Creator without the creature?"
"In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life."
"My reputation was a bit exaggerated. Things were written in newspapers, then copied, then doubled. One of the reasons why I never disclaimed that, was because I found it amusing. But I also constructed such an image for myself in order to gain more of a private life."
"But since the world, which thou art to strive against, is not without thee, but within thee, it follows, that it is also to be conquered not without, but within thee."
"There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality."
"A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not."
"There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol."
"Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways."
"That was the first major social sciences conference at which social scientists from all cultures wanted to reach a consensus on whether we can continue to pursue a national course in the social sciences or whether we need a cosmopolitan path that also connects us in a new way."
"The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition."
"Based on history the expectations are simply the highest, it kind of could become a burden for you or it could be something that you are really proud of, you know so I take the second one."
"He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times."
"A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes."
"A person places themselves on a level with the ones they praise."
"What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!"
"Philosophical reflection could not leave the relation of mind and spirit in the obscurity which had satisfied the needs of the naive consciousness."
"But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history."
"Girls had never been important. I'd had a girlfriend or two and had liked them a lot but it wasn't love, because my first love was tennis."
"Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven."
"Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward."
"My country right or wrong; when right, to keep her right; when wrong, to put her right."
"And finally, it was Deuteronomy that brought about the historical result of Josiah's reformation."
"Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward things are barely discernible."
"The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything."
"May we soon enjoy the fruits of our labor in a peaceful and united Germany."
"To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction."
"Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him."
"Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends."
"What is thematically posited is only what is given, by pure reflection, with all its immanent essential moments absolutely as it is given to pure reflection."
"It's a bit loose and the people in my group have got other groups. They don't have to have a total allegiance to me. I think that's really a bit weird and showing some weird insecurity."
"Human love has little regard for the truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person."
"This discovery convinced me of the power of crystallography and led me to continue in this field."
"Great progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included)."
"But live shows are cool. I just got back into the idea of enjoying it live."
"Nonetheless, we continue to be obsessed with finding or inventing a European nation which, as in the nation state, guarantees homogeneity and thus an appropriate form of democracy and centralized government."
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