German Philosopher Quotes

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

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

In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The sage of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.

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

It is the business of theories to forecast "facts", and of facts to form points of departure for theories, which again, when verified by the new facts to which they have successfully led, will extend the borders of knowledge.

F. C. S. Schiller

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 state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.

Moses Mendelssohn

We will always find fundamentally the compulsion to become what the soul should be...

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

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

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 term 'charisma' will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a 'leader.

All natural phenomena, without exception, from the motions of the celestial bodies to the growth of plants and the consciousness of men.... Are ultimately to be reduced to atomic mechanics.

[Nature is] that which is ever growing and ever unfolding itself in new forms.

Carl Gustav Carus

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

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

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 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

Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out! The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise. It must be as if the bowstring suddenly cut through the thumb that held it. You mustn't open the right hand on purpose.