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

Learning and enjoyment are the secret to a fulfilled life. Learning without enjoyment wears you down, enjoyment without learning dulls you.

Richard David Precht

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

The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.

Thomas Metzinger

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

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

The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each individual constructs his or her own "reality" (Foerster, 1973) and that knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world of experience (von Glasersfeld, 1987).

Ernst von Glasersfeld

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.

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

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

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

That the world is not governed as is frequently expressed, but that the changes and motions of matter obey a necessity inherent in it, which admits of no exception, cannot be denied by any person who is but superficially acquainted with the natural sciences.

Ludwig Büchner

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.

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