German Poet Quotes

Novalis
Friedrich Hölderlin
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Else Lasker-Schüler
Ludwig Uhland
Walther von der Vogelweide
Matthias Claudius

Now as all the sciences are connected with each other, Philosophy is never completed. In a complete system of all the sciences will philosophy for the first time be made manifest.

Novalis
Novalis
Dear Fatherland, no danger thine:
Firm stands thy watch along the Rhine.

I want to make a summing up, brief and to the point, but thorough. I have never suppressed a word in my books out of regard for other people and their prejudices.

John Henry Mackay
John Henry Mackay
When the tempest rages,
In the Rock of Ages
I will safely hide;
Though the earth be shaking,
And all hearts be quaking,
Christ is at my side.

I do not know the speech
Of this cool land,
I cannot keep its pace.

Else Lasker-Schüler
Else Lasker-Schüler
An intellectual who accommodates the ruling caste betrays the spirit. For the spirit is not conservative and grants no privileges. It dissolves; it equalizes; and it pushes through the ruins of hundreds of castles toward the final fulfillment of truth and justice, and their completion, even if it is the completion of death.

Everything emotional in America becomes a mere show and make-believe. Americans are trained to invest money, are said to take even desperate chances on that, yet never do they invest [in] beauty nor take desperate chances on that. With money they try to buy beauty—after it has died—famishing—with grimace. Beauty is ever dead in America.

I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation.

Oh! make me Thine forever;
And should I fainting be,
Lord! let me never, never,
Outlive my love to Thee!

Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,—
Take, I give it willingly;
For, invisible to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me.

Ludwig Uhland
Ludwig Uhland
Whatsoever Venus bids
Is a joy excelling,
Never in an evil heart
Did she make her dwelling.

What should I do if in fretful sleep
The ghosts of the slaughtered were to appear,
Bloody, pale, and wan, and weep
In front of me, what should I do?

Matthias Claudius
Matthias Claudius
Not alone is the child born through the mother, but the mother also is born through the child.

The best Medicine: Joy and Temperance and Repose
Slam the door on the doctor's nose.

Only one thing abides: an infinite beauty that passes from form to form, eternally changed and revealed afresh.

Between dusk and dawn many a head has turned white. Who can believe it? And mine has not changed on all this long journey.

Wilhelm Müller
Wilhelm Müller
For many call Thee Father, who
Will not own me as brother too.

Walther von der Vogelweide
Walther von der Vogelweide
A loyal-hearted man rejoices at a friend's advancement; a disloyal man cries out in sorrow when something pleasant befalls his friend and he is there to see it.

Near and
Hard to grasp, the god.
Yet where danger lies,
Grows that which saves.

Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
People and nations could live in grace
but for two little words, "mine" and "yours".