Heinrich Heine Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

On wings of song, my dearest,
I will carry you off.

Heinrich Heine
I had once a beautiful fatherland.
The oak tree
Grew so high there, violets nodded softly.
It was a dream.

It kissed me in German and spoke in German
(You would hardly believe
How good it sounded) the words: "I love you!"
It was a dream.

Heinrich Heine
Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle. For it stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter, a sort of nebulous mediator.

Heinrich Heine
Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death.

Heinrich Heine
There are more fools in the world than there are people.

Heinrich Heine
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

Heinrich Heine
So we keep asking, over and over,
Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths —
But is that an answer?

Heinrich Heine
Oh what lies there are in kisses!
And their guile so well prepared!
Sweet the snaring is; but this is
Sweeter still, to be ensnared.

Heinrich Heine
I know not why I am so sad; I cannot get out of my head a fairy-tale of olden times.

Heinrich Heine
Do you hear the little bell tinkle? Kneel down. They are bringing the sacraments to a dying god.

Heinrich Heine
Oh, they loved dearly: their souls kissed, they kissed with their eyes, they were both but one single kiss.

Heinrich Heine
It may be that the stars of heaven appear to us fair and pure simply because we are at such a distance from them, and know nothing of their private life.

Heinrich Heine
While we are indifferent to our good qualities, we keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we come to look on them as virtues.

Heinrich Heine
The foolish race of mankind are swarming below in the night; they shriek and rage and quarrel - and all of them are right.

Heinrich Heine
The future smells of Russian leather, of blood, of godlessness and of much whipping. I advise our grandchildren to come into the world with very thick skin on their backs.

Heinrich Heine
Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

Heinrich Heine
Wherever books will be burned, men also, in the end, are burned.

Heinrich Heine
Life is a disease, the whole world a hospital, and Death is our physician.

Heinrich Heine
The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.

Heinrich Heine
Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.

Heinrich Heine
I cannot tell why this imagined Despair has fallen upon me; The ghost of an ancient legend That will not let me be.

Heinrich Heine
Last words:
Of course he [God] will forgive me; that's his business.

Heinrich Heine
Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.

Heinrich Heine
Sweet May hath come to love us,
Flowers, trees, their blossoms don;
And through the blue heavens above us
The very clouds move on.

Heinrich Heine
You're lovely as a flower,
So pure and fair to see;
I look at you, and sadness
Comes stealing over me.

Heinrich Heine
The gazelles so gentle and clever Skip lightly in frolicsome mood.

Heinrich Heine
Sweet May lies fresh before us, To life the young flowers leap, And through the Heaven's blue o'er us The rosy cloudlets sweep.

Heinrich Heine
I consider it a degradation and a stain on my honor to submit to baptism in order to qualify myself for state employment in Prussia.

Heinrich Heine
The sea knows all things; for, at night, the stars confide to it the hidden mysteries of heaven.

Heinrich Heine
The violets prattle and titter, And gaze on the stars high above.

Heinrich Heine