German Philosopher Quotes

Karl Marx

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Immanuel Kant

Friedrich Nietzsche

Arthur Schopenhauer

Theodor W. Adorno

Friedrich Schiller

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

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

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!

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

Theodor W. Adorno

Physics has ascended to summits hitherto visible only to philosophers, whose gaze has, however, not always been free from metaphysical haziness.

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

Each theory becomes a Procrustean bed in which the empirical facts are stretched to fit a preconceived pattern.

Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.

Beauty is incapable of any explanatory science. The decisions in which we recognize it, the criticisms of Taste, are not to be built upon inductive reasonings.

Matthias Jakob Schleiden

Our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. … Capacity of thought does not keep pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of critique. … Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference.

Peter Sloterdijk

Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered.

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

Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

The deep satisfaction found in scientific work, akin to the delight derived from genuine art, is one of the fundamental human emotions which is highly intensified by personal contact with the creative mind.

Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider

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

Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty.

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

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

We have repeatedly insisted... that the boundary between truth and error is not a rigid one, and we were able ultimately to demonstrate that what we generally call truth, namely a conceptual world coinciding with the external world, is merely the most expedient error.

For our intellectual spirit has the power of fire in itself. For no other purpose is it sent by God to the earth than that it glow and grow into a flame. When it is excited by admiration, then it grows, just as if the wind entering into a fire excited its potential to actuality. If we apprehend the works of God, we marvel at eternal wisdom.

Nicholas of Cusa

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

No one has a right to speak who, in the midst of thinking, hasn't been overcome with the experience of glimpsing the essence of history.

Gershom Scholem

Factual assertions and fundamental principles are...merely parts of theories: they are given within the framework of a theory; they are chosen and valid within this framework; and subsequently they are dependent upon it. This holds for all empirical sciences—for the natural sciences as well as those pertaining to history.

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