German Philosopher Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Art is not just one among a number of items, activities one engages in and enjoys now and then; art places the whole of Dasein in decision and keeps it there. For that reason art itself is subject to altogether singular conditions.

Martin Heidegger

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.

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.

The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from persons, from personal dominion, from the master; the securing of each individual person against other persons, personal freedom.

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.

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

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

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

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.

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

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

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 universe as a totality is without cause, without origin, without end.

Karl Freiherr von Prel

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

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

Christ, with whom the multitude could not deal other than by making him into God Himself, thus enabling itself to venerate as God him whom they had loathed as man.

Constantin Brunner

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

Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particular Thou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou.

The analysis of the Aristotelian theory of life must therefore be one of the corner-stones of any historical works on biology.

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