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Quotes by German Authors
"The two designs are completely different. The first is totally futuristic, the second is more classical. You can of course get very excited about doing something completely out of the ordinary, just like the Olympic stadium in its time. But each to his or her own taste."
"An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment."
"For whatever a man has, is in reality only a gift."
"Ladies and gentlemen, I take office at a time in which the world is living in extreme contradictions."
"Only the Russian Cultural Officer was interested in my project."
"We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection."
"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us."
"I understood that the will could not be improved before the mind had been enlightened."
"The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization."
"I wish, naturally to prevent the possibility that someone may write an accidental, superficial, incomplete and perhaps untrue picture of me."
"Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations."
"May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law."
"It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art."
"Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets itin its constellation, and gives the measureof distance into its hand? Who makes a child's deathout of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves itinside its round mouth like the coreof a shining apple? Killers areeasy to grasp. But this: death,the whole of death, before life,to hold it so softly, and not live in anger,cannot be expressed."
"Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must strictly speaking at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back."
"The other guys drink, but they don't drink anywhere near what I used to. And I think they're slightly respectful of the fact that I'm off it, so it's not a problem."
"Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say."
"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change."
"To see this place would truly be worth a trip to India in itself, and from the spirit of the religion that lived here one can learn more in an hour of viewing than from all the books ever written."
"If some things don't make you lose your sense of reason, then you have none to lose."
"You know how much I am inclined to explain all disputes among philosophical schools as merely verbal disputes or at least to derive them originally from verbal disputes."
"Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves."
"The time has come - and must come - for multilateral conversations about a secure peace in all of Europe."
"Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child."
"Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic."
"On recovering my senses, I hastened to quit a place where I hoped there was nothing further to detain me. I first filled my pockets with gold, then fastened the strings of the purse round my neck, and concealed it in my bosom."
"I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act."
"What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work."
"I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?"
"Apprentice is the beginner - the first years you work in a craft in the European sense you are an apprentice. That takes 3 or 4 years. Then you are a journeyman. You can go from one master to another and learn other tricks and other secrets."
"I was ready to accept the philosophy that the Party is right and that in the coming struggle you could not permit yourself any doubts after the party had made a decision."
"Common sense is the genius of humanity."
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