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Quotes by German Authors
"The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another."
"He's afraid,' Graber said.'Yes, naturally. But he's a good dog.'And a man-eater.'We're all that.'Why?'We are. And we think, just like that dog, that we are still good. And just like him we are looking for a bit of warmth and light and friendship."
"When a nation which has long groaned under the intolerable yoke of a tyrant rises at last and throws off its chains, do you call that weakness? The man who, to rescue his house from the flames, finds his physical strength redoubled, so that he lifts burdens with ease which in the absence of excitement he could scarcely move; he who under the rage of an insult attacks and puts to flight half a score of his enemies,-are such persons to be called weak? My good friend, if resistance be strength, how can the highest degree of resistance be a weakness?"
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it's two hours. That's relativity."
"A man of conviction is often more to be desired than a man of experience."
"A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath."
"To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting."
"From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us - mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever."
"Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!"
"The secret of living in peace with all people lies in the art of understanding each one by his own individuality."
"The true religion is to be posited not in the knowledge or confession of what God allegedly does or has done for our salvation, but in what we must do to become worthy of this."
"Life presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly, happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable."
"Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live."
"The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them."
"Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money."
"A bath and a tenderloin steak. Those are the high points of a man's life."
"Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winterthat only by wintering through it will your heart survive."
"Convictions are prisons."
"The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present."
"Knowledge kills action action requires the veils of illusion."
"Being must be 'felt' it can not be 'thought."
"It shifted attention away from that and I've never been someone who liked the attention from the media anyway."
"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
"To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children."
"Genius is among other minds what the carbuncle is among gemstones, it radiates its own light while the others only reflect what they receive."
"There had never been any more between us thanchance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtednessand binds closer than much else."
"Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night!"
"The destiny of our society is yours to make and you have a vastly greater importance to the world than we do."
"Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem."
"Life is a constant process of dying."
"Life isn't worth living, unless it is lived for someone else."
"What is worse than doing evil, is being evil (Ethics, p.67). To lie is wrong, but what is worse than the lie is the liar, for the liar contaminates everything he says, because everything he says is meant to further a cause that is false. The liar as liar has endorsed a world of falsehood and deception, and to focus only on the truth or falsity of his particular statements is to miss the danger of being caught up in his twisted world. This is why, as Bonhoeffer says, that "(i)t is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie (Ethics, p.67)."
"It's good for you to see your friends arrested. It hardens you. There's no place in our New Order for sentimentalists."
"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage."
"What I'm working on is for people to be able to say that Kippenberger had this really good mood."
"Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself."
"When someone is searching, said Siddhartha, then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don't see, which are directly in front of your eyes."
"God made the integers; all else is the work of man."
"There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges-the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light."
"To love is to recognize yourself in another."
"At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost."
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