German Philosopher Quotes

Karl Marx

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Immanuel Kant

Friedrich Nietzsche

Arthur Schopenhauer

Theodor W. Adorno

Friedrich Schiller

The art of governing is a great metier, requiring the whole man, and it is therefore not well for a ruler to have too strong tendencies for other affairs.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Give me matter and I will construct a world out of it!

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

Help thyself: then everyone will help thee too. Principle of Christian charity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

Theodor W. Adorno

There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion. Take from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer exist.

Evil does not approach us as pride any more, but on the contrary as slumber, lassitude, concealment of the "I." … It may make us so quickly contented, that any definitive fire will die down. The venomous, breathtaking frigid mist seems able … to harden hearts and fill them with envy, obduracy and resentment, with bloody scorn for the divine image and light, with all the causes of the only true original sin, which is not wanting to be like God.

Jedes geeinzelte Du ist ein Durchblick zu ihm. Durch jedes geeinzelte Du spricht das Grundwort das Ewige an. Every particularThou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particularThou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou. 164

When we say that scientific knowledge is unlimited, we mean "there is no question whose answer is in principle unattainable by science."

The sun is invisible in men, but visible in the world, yet both are of one and the same sun.

My mind can take no hold on the present world, nor rest in it a moment, but my whole nature rushes onward with irresistible force towards a future and better state of being.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

Jürgen Habermas

A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.

Johann Georg Hamann

Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Pessimism negates the existing world. Yet its negating is ambiguous. It can simply will decay and nothingness, but it can also renounce what exists and thus open a path for a new formation of the world.

Martin Heidegger

I am no longer misled, therefore, by the mechanism of revolutions: it is as necessary to our species, as the waves to the stream, that it becomes not a stagnant pool. The genius of humanity blooms in continually renovated youth.

Johann Gottfried Herder

The eternity of the spirit does not begin after death... but is, like God, always present.

When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.

Besides the pleasure derived from acquired knowledge, there lurks in the mind of man, and tinged with a shade of sadness, an unsatisfactory longing for something beyond the present, a striving towards regions yet unknown and unopened.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Within this widest concept of object, and specifically within the concept of individual object, Objects and phenomena stand in contrast with each other.

People far too easily neglect or abuse us, as soon as we become intimate with them. To live pleasantly, one must almost always remain a stranger in the crowd.

Adolph Freiherr Knigge

We moderns do not believe in demigods, but our smallest hero we expect to feel and act as a demigod.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

The organism is thus being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered. Inasmuch as the greater liberty involves a contraction rather than extension and development of instinctual needs, it works for rather than against the status quo of general repression - one might speak of "institutionalized desublimation". The latter appears to be a vital factor in the making of the authoritarian personality of our time.

Herbert Marcuse