Quotes by German authors

See the complete list of authors from Germany

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

"A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

"A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

"A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

Wilhelm II

"I have no use for intellectuals. They get lost in abstractions and forget the real world"

Wilhelm II, Statesman

Wilhelm II

"I am the voice of God on earth; I speak with the authority of the Almighty"

Wilhelm II, Statesman

Wilhelm II

"Germany must be strong and united if it is to survive in the face of its enemies"

Wilhelm II, Statesman

Wilhelm II

"The English are my enemies, my deadly enemies. They will do everything in their power to destroy me and my country"

Wilhelm II, Statesman

Wilhelm II

"I am the supreme warlord; I do not wage war in order to achieve definite military objectives, but to destroy the enemy"

Wilhelm II, Statesman

Wilhelm II

"A man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but a man who is still a socialist at forty has no head"

Wilhelm II, Statesman

Wilhelm II

"The people I am most afraid of are the clever ones. They have so many brains that they can think of mischief against me"

Wilhelm II, Statesman

Wilhelm II

"I believe in the divine right of kings and the necessity of strong leadership"

Wilhelm II, Statesman

"Half a doctor's work is done if he is called 'Doctor.'"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes — so check your value to the community"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"As one gets older, it happens that in the morning one fails to remember the airplane trip to be taken in a few hours or the lecture scheduled for the afternoon"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

Max Born

"There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method"

Max Born, Mathematician

Max Born

"Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless"

Max Born, Mathematician

"Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"The least touchable object in the world is the eye"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"Don't confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"Whenever ideas fail, men invent words"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"The practice of medicine is a thinker's art the practice of surgery a plumber's"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"The rehabilitation of order as a universal principle, however, suggested at the same time that orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"In a land of immigrants, one was not an alien but simply the latest arrival"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

Max Born

"The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world"

Max Born, Mathematician

Max Born

"And the continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have always been included as limiting cases in the new ones"

Max Born, Mathematician

"When a system is considered in two different states, the difference in volume or in any other property, between the two states, depends solely upon those states themselves and not upon the manner in which the system may pass from one state to the other"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"The line that describes the beautiful is elliptical. It has simplicity and constant change. It cannot be described by a compass, and it changes direction at every one of its points"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"Modem science, then, maintains on the one hand that nature, both organic and inorganic, strives towards a state of order and that man's actions are governed by the same tendency"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"Furthermore, order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"The clarification of visual forms and their organization in integrated patterns as well as the attribution of such forms to suitable objects is one of the most effective training grounds of the young mind"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

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