659 Quotes by Swiss authors

Swiss sayings tend to speak in a low voice, with a cool clarity shaped by Alpine hush and village-square debate. Their humor is dry, multilingual, and exacting; praise is spare, duty careful, and liberty tempered by neighborly regard. Craft over spectacle, patience over haste: wisdom that moves like a sure-footed path rather than a fanfare. Modest images of stone, water, and light recur, alongside a federal mosaic of perspectives and an ethic of reliability, restraint, and quiet daring.

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"Make friends with the angels, who though invisible are always with you. Often invoke them, constantly praise them, and make good use of their help and assistance in all your temporal and spiritual affairs"

Saint Francis de Sales, Clergyman

Saint Francis de Sales

"The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen"

Paul Klee, Artist

Paul Klee

"Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will"

Paul Klee, Artist

Paul Klee

"In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better"

Paul Klee, Artist

Paul Klee

"A drawing is simply a line going for a walk"

Paul Klee, Artist

Paul Klee

"Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter"

Paul Klee, Artist

Paul Klee

"The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions"

Paul Klee, Artist

Paul Klee

"Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see"

Paul Klee, Artist

Paul Klee

"The savages don't have atom bombs"

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Author

Friedrich Durrenmatt

"Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands"

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Author

Friedrich Durrenmatt

"Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality"

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Author

Friedrich Durrenmatt

"Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason"

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Author

Friedrich Durrenmatt

"The worst possible turn can not be programmed. It is caused by coincidence"

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Author

Friedrich Durrenmatt

"Human life is beyond comprehension"

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Author

Friedrich Durrenmatt

"For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence"

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Author

Friedrich Durrenmatt

"This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge"

Jean Piaget, Psychologist

"During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions"

Jean Piaget, Psychologist

"It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth"

Jean Piaget, Psychologist

"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well"

Elias Canetti, Author

Elias Canetti

"The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble"

Elias Canetti, Author

Elias Canetti

"I cannot afford to waste my time making money"

Louis Agassiz, Scientist

"Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines"

Paracelsus, Scientist

"The glacier was God's great plough set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth"

Louis Agassiz, Scientist

"What sense would it make or what would it benfit a physician if he discovered the origin of the diseases but could not cure or alleviate them?"

Paracelsus, Scientist

"Nature also forges man, now a gold man, now a silver man, now a fig man, now a bean man"

Paracelsus, Scientist

"What the eyes perceive in herbs or stones or trees is not yet a remedy; the eyes see only the dross"

Paracelsus, Scientist

"Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man"

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologian

"But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation"

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologian

"If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other"

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologian

"Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets"

Paul Tournier, Author

"Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming"

Niklaus Wirth, Scientist

"I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself"

Alberto Giacometti, Sculptor

"Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings"

Niklaus Wirth, Scientist

"My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation"

Niklaus Wirth, Scientist

"Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away"

Alberto Giacometti, Sculptor

"In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession"

Alberto Giacometti, Sculptor

"All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life"

Alberto Giacometti, Sculptor

"That is the Roman way: to give favors to the favorites"

Hans Kung, Theologian

"That means that every human being - without distinction of sex, age, race, skin color, language, religion, political view, or national or social origin - possesses an inalienable and untouchable dignity"

Hans Kung, Theologian

"Religion often is misused for purely power-political goals, including war"

Hans Kung, Theologian

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