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Quotes by German Authors
"Is anarchism possible? The failure of attempts to attain freedom does not mean the cause is lost."
"Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications."
"My kids are not known, and I think that is very important. So far they have lived a normal life, and will continue to do so. I feel they should have the possibility to live a free life without the burden of fame I have created."
"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."
"By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man."
"Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free."
"The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value."
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
"Christian life consists in faith and charity."
"Let This Darkness Be a Bell TowerQuiet friend who has come so far,feel how your breathing makes more space around you.Let this darkness be a bell towerand you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.Move back and forth into the change.What is it like, such intensity of pain?If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.In this uncontainable night,be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,the meaning discovered there.And if the world has ceased to hear you,say to the silent earth: I flow.To the rushing water, speak: I am."
"Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations."
"I more fear what is within me than what comes from without."
"Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt."
"A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there."
"Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized."
"Those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world."
"Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical."
"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."
"Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking."
"Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance."
"The tea is ice-cold, the room grows colder and colder, but I grow warmer and warmer."
"Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing."
"The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification."
"Disease is a vital expression of the human organism."
"One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them."
"Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see."
"A man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for."
"Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."
"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting."
"Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous"
"All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?"
"Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form."
"Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is."
"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
"Architecture in general is frozen music."
"Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy."
"Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm."
"There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence."
"The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure."
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