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Quotes by German Authors
"A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world."
"It is not the strength but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men."
"It is the theory that decides what can be observed."
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."
"The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom."
"Yes, death is strong, but look you, the strongest, Stronger is music than death."
"Then come the wild weather, come sleet or come snow, we will stand by each other, however it blow."
"Although I'm only fourteen, I know quite well what I want, I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite indepedent of anyone."
"It's just that when you're standing beside an open window at twilight, you can say more toeach other than in bright sunshine. It's also easier to whisper your feelings than toshout them from the rooftops."
"I am much afraid that the universities will prove to be the great gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt."
"The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy."
"What you inherit from your fathermust first be earned before it's yours."
"But in Christianity, by contrast, the freedom of the children of God was also freedom from all important worldly interests, from all art and science, etc."
"This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves."
"And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world."
"Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession."
"And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art."
"I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us."
"There is no higher or purer pleasure than to sit with closed eyes and hear a naturally expressive voice recite... a play of Shakespeare's."
"It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds."
"A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it."
"Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be."
"Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person."
"When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice."
"Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have."
"Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind."
"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking."
"The world won't be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."
"Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme."
"Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare."
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
"All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it."
"Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them."
"Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane."
"Long you must suffer, knowing not what,until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you.Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it."
"Adversity introduces a man to himself."
"I have to hurry all day to get time to pray."
"In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance."
"I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet."
"Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world."
"Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge."
"I'll show then that Anne Frank wasn't born yesterday."
"A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude."
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