top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by German Authors
"Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass - you don't see it, but somehow it does something."
"Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time."
"Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ."
"At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards."
"Weapons are created to be used. There's no place for the weak on this earth."
"It is becoming a bad dream-- in the daytime as well as at night. I see him nearly all the time and can't get at him, I mustn't show anything, must remain gay while I'm really in despair."
"With rising incomes, the share of expenditures for food products declines. The resulting shift in expenditures affects demand patterns and employment structures."
"Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force."
"The knowledge and understanding of the world which science gives us and the magnificent opportunity which it extends to us to control and use the world for the extension of our pleasure in it has never been greater than it now is."
"Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl."
"The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him."
"The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power."
"It was fortunate that love did not need words, or else it would be full of misunderstanding and foolishness."
"For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it."
"An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination."
"It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)."
"Don't look for peace. Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender"
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
"Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous."
"The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes."
"The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them."
"No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else."
"A miracle is never perfect when it happens, there are always little disappointments. But once it's gone for good and nothing can change it, memory could make it perfect and then it would never change. If I can just call it to life now, won't it always stay the same? Won't it stay with me as long as I live?"
"This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...But you must play your part and sing a song, one of your best."
"It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own."
"If God were willing to sell His grace, we would accept it more quickly and gladly than when He offers it for nothing."
"Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own."
"Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent."
"Thoughts and sorrows seem to have remained on the other side of the mountains. Between tormented men and hateful deeds, a person has to think and sorrow so much! Back there it is so difficult and so desperately important to find a reason for staying alive. How else should a person go on living? Sheer misery makes one profound."
"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
"I count myself fortunate to be able to participate in the life of science in this era."
bottom of page