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Quotes by German Authors
"The state is in danger of falling into disrepute due to the evidence of its inadequate resources."
"This morning I lay in the bathtub thinking how wonderful it would be if I had a dog like Rin Tin Tin. I'd call him Rin Tin Tin too, and I'd take him to school with me, where he could stay in the janitor's room or by the bicycle racks when the weather was good."
"Because it appears to me a hazardous thing to exchange my soul for my shadow."
"What people will say about me then - or maybe not say - will be the only thing that finally counts."
"I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all - or am I?"
"And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts."
"Perhaps at a later point important developments will be traced back to September 11. But for now we do not know which of the many scenarios will actually hold in the future."
"Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations."
"It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws."
"It is precisely as though I were possessed by some other spirit when I enter on a new task of acting, as though something within me presses a switch and my own consciousness merges into some other, greater, more vital being."
"The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks."
"We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer."
"If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him."
"It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow."
"The sight of nature fascinates, the family tie has a sweet enchantment and patriotism gives the religious spirit a fiery devotion to the powers that it reveres."
"To the socialist no nation is free whose national existence is based upon the enslavement of another people, for to him colonial peoples, too, are peoples, and, as such, parts of the national state."
"In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it."
"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid."
"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive."
"But we should also not forget the difference between what first motivated me and the work that is the result."
"In science there are no 'depths'; there is surface everywhere."
"The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?"
"A woman must be a woman and cannot be a man. She, too, is God's creature and her divine station is that she should bear and care for and rear children. So I am a man created for another office and work. But should I be proud because of this and say: I am not a woman, therefore I am better in the sight of God? Should I not rather praise God for creating both the woman and me also through the woman and putting me in this station? What a un-Christian thing it is that one should despire another because he is in another station or is doing something other then he is doing?... "Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled." for God will not and can not tolerate such pride and arrogance."
"Truth is the greatest of all national possessions. A state, a people, a system which suppresses the truth or fears to publish it, deserves to collapse."
"Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed."
"And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it."
"Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility."
"Imperialism is not the creation of any one or any one group of states."
"Judaism boasts of no exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation, of no revealed religion in the sense in which that term is usually understood."
"If God and man are in themselves one, and if religion is the human side of this unity then must this unity be made evident to man in religion, and become in him consciousness and reality."
"And in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary separates us from darkness - we are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted sounds of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night."
"All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green."
"Racial history is therefore natural history and the mysticism of the soul at one and the same time; but the history of the religion of the blood, conversely, is the great world story of the rise and downfall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists."
"Both state and church have as their object actions as well as convictions, the former insofar as they are based on the relations between man and nature, the latter insofar as they are based on the relations between nature and God."
"The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable."
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