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Quotes by German Authors
"The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous."
"The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them."
"Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties."
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
"Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy."
"The script was very explicit about the nudity that was supposed to be in the movie. Actually, they don't show everything we shot. They would cut here and it was floored. It was very embarrassing."
"Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men."
"We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers."
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
"National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right."
"Einer hat immer Unrecht: aber mit zweien beginnt die Wahrheit. Einer kann sich nicht beweisen: aber zweie kann man bereits nicht widerlegen."
"The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature, only as its counterpart."
"One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons."
"Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious."
"Morality without a sense of paradox is mean."
"Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice."
"Love is not only pure joy, and delight, but also great and deep heaviness of heart and sorrow. But love too is full of joy and sweetness even in bitter sorrow, because it regards the misery and injury of others as its own. So also Christ was glowing with burning love in His last and greatest agony. According to St. Hilary, it was Christ's greatest joy that He endured the greatest woe. Thus God "giveth strength and power unto His people" (Ps. 68:15). While they experience the greatest sorrow, their hearts overflow with joy."
"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."
"Strict conservation of energy in the elementary process had thus been confirmed also by a negative experiment."
"The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being."
"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."
"What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?"
"I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution."
"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."
"How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?"
"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language."
"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."
"The development of a rational view of the nature of catalysis was thus absolutely dependent on the creation of the concept of the rate of chemical reaction."
"We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare."
"I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got."
"Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour."
"It is neither right nor safe to go against my conscience."
"If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the "Beyond " into nothingness " one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct, all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering."
"I did not destroy the 43 volumes of my diary, which report on all these events and the share I had in them; but of my own accord I handed them voluntarily to the officers of the American Army who arrested me."
"Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them."
"From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned."
"Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life " and being successful."
"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."
"Not without a shudder may the human hand reach into the mysterious urn of destiny."
"You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates."
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