Bernd Quotes & Sayings

All we did was to turn back the time to a photography of precision which is superior to the human eye. — Bernd Becher

I'd like to return to prose after a fifteen-year hiatus. An epistolary novella maybe. A man went into the mountains fifteen years ago to write the following letter to a woman: "Dear B., I'd like to strike you down with an iron rod. Maybe I love you. If you feel the same way and your wishes conform to mine, then please please get in touch with me posthaste. We'll discuss this matter together and make the necessary arrangements if everything works out. With warm wishes, Your Bernd." The letter is, however, never mailed and never written. In further letters to B. from Bernd, he pursues, among other things, the question: why? The last letter could be the one in which Bernd lets B. know that the matter has been settled since he has just been struck down by a group of women with iron rods. — Urs Allemann

Consciousness is not a thing. It is a continuum without boundaries. We can most readily see its presence or absence in the extremes. In mussels, and in men. Is one of those extremes for birds found in ravens? Is it of sufficient magnitude for us to detect with our feeble detectors, our minds? — Bernd Heinrich

The essential thing is to run period!
And to do it for a long time and consistently and then everything will take care of itself. — Bernd Heinrich

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection. - ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, German philosopher — Bernd Heinrich

behavior that they understand God's commands and can transform abstract commandments into compassionate personal action. Until now I was neither a religious nor spiritual person. — Bernd Wollschlaeger

All the people with whom I was very close at one point in my life - Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Nono, Bernd Alois Zimmermann - they are all gone. — Pierre Boulez

Movement is the essence of life. — Bernd Heinrich

Conditions are seldom ideal, and if one waits long enough for ideal conditions one is just making excuses. — Bernd Heinrich

In order to forge alliances, we first need worthy adversaries. Without adversaries, no alliances are necessary. — Bernd Heinrich

The very idea of "managing" a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing. — Bernd Heinrich

Planting nuts requires a vision for a future that goes beyond one's mortal reach. If we envision ourselves as participants in the same grand, complex web of interactions as the forest, then planting acorns is like planting part of ourselves. The morality that comes from such a vision of ecosystem-as-life is a common thread that, if taught and encouraged, could unite all of mankind. — Bernd Heinrich

Our camera does not produce pretty pictures, but exact duplications that, through our renunciation of photographic effects, turn out to be relatively objective. The photo can optically replace its object to a certain degree. This takes on special meaning if the object cannot be preserved. — Bernd Becher

The question if this is a work of art or not is not very interesting for us. Probably it is situated in between the established categories. Anyway the audience which is interested in art would be the most open-minded and willing to think about it. — Bernd Becher

There is beauty not only in that things work, but how they work. — Bernd Heinrich

Running is perhaps the most fundamental of all sports, and it is economically the least costly to perform. As a consequence, it is the most democratic and most competitive of all sports because individual merit can prevail despite economic equality. It is a sport for everyone, the whole world over. — Bernd Heinrich

When someone discovers something in their lives that really interests them, then they should be content with doing that - without having to go and lie on a beach once a year. — Bernd Becher

The only reason that we like complex numbers is that we don't like real numbers. — Bernd Sturmfels

Give a man the secure possession of bleak rocks," Arthur Young said in Travels in 1787, "and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years of lease of a garden, and he will convert it to a desert ... — Bernd Heinrich

As Hans Bernd Gisevius, a civil servant under Hitler and a member of the German Resistance, puts it: One of the vital lessons that we must learn from the German disaster is the ease with which a people can be sucked down into the morass of inaction; let them as individuals fall prey to overcleverness, opportunism, or cowardliness and they are irrevocably lost. — Philip Ball

Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath. Yet, tree planting is often pictorially advertised on television and in national magazines by focusing on cupped caring hands around a seedling. But forests do not need this godlike interference ... Planting tree plantations is permanent deforestation ... The extensive planting of just one exotic species removes thousands of native species. — Bernd Heinrich

I retained little from the textbooks, learning instead from what I lived and the things I touched that held emotional content for me. — Bernd Heinrich

The behaviour of lovers is oscillating like the moon, and unpredictable as the weather ... — Bernd Schuster

This is about objects, not motifs. The photo is only a substitute for an object; it is unsuitable as a picture in its customary sense. — Bernd Becher

THE FOLLOWING LATE April I found a dead bull moose about two kilometers from the site where I had left the doe. A bull moose probably weighs ten times as much as a white-tailed doe. This one looked emaciated; it had apparently died from complications of moose tick disease, a common — Bernd Heinrich

We gauge what we think is possible by what we know from experience, and our acceptance of scientific insights, in particular, is incremental, gained one experience at a time. — Bernd Heinrich

he jumped in under the running water, squeaked as if in ecstasy, bent his legs to get deeper, and whirred his wings like an egg beater in high gear. The spray flew several meters, soaking the floor and counters near the sink. Then he jumped out dripping wet and fluttered back into the cage to shake vigorously and preen until dry. — Bernd Heinrich

As time went by we developed a sort of ideology without ever formulating it as such. I've always said that we are documenting the sacred buildings of Calvinism. Calvinism rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The buildings we photograph originate directly from this purely economical thinking. — Bernd Becher

BORN TO RUN In his book Racing the Antelope: What Animals Can Teach Us about Running and Life, biologist Bernd Heinrich describes the human species as an endurance predator. The genes that govern our bodies today evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, when we were in constant motion, either foraging for food or chasing antelope for hours and days across the plains. Heinrich describes how, even though antelope are among the fastest mammals, our ancestors were able to hunt them down by driving them to exhaustion - keeping on their tails until they had no energy left to escape. Antelope are sprinters, but their metabolism doesn't allow them to go and go and go. Ours does. And we have a fairly balanced distribution of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers, so even after ranging miles over the landscape we retain the metabolic capacity to sprint in short bursts to make the kill. — John J. Ratey

For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials. — Bernd Heinrich

The job has not been done to Admiral Hyman Rickover's specifications. He admonished, "Nature is not as forgiving as Christ. — Bernd Heinrich

Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice. — Bernd Heinrich

The guy on the left shrugged and raised up an inch off his chair and dug in his back pants pocket. The other guy did the same. Reacher watched. Safe enough. No one kept a weapon in his back pants pocket. Uncomfortable. Not readily accessible. The guys came out with two IDs each. Plastic, the size of credit cards. But not. They were national identity cards, and driver's licenses. Both had Bundesrepublik Deutschland at the top. Germany. The Federal Republic. The photographs were right. The guy on the left was named Bernd Durnberger, and the guy on the right was named Klaus Augenthaler. Reacher — Lee Child

Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows disentangle themselves from night, watching minders limp past in the dawnn. It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels ad Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams. — Anthony Doerr

What does he remember? He saw the engineer Bernd close the cellar door and sit on the stairs. — Anthony Doerr

By providing safe nesting sites, woodpeckers are thus keystone organisms for a vast assemblage of birds the world over, including many owls, parrots, parids, flycatchers. — Bernd Heinrich

I do not yet want to form a hypothesis to test, because as soon as you make a hypothesis, you become prejudiced. Your mind slides into a groove, and once it is in that groove, has difficulty noticing anything outside of it. During this time, my sense must be sharp; that is the main thing - to be sharp, yet open. — Bernd Heinrich

ROA, KONRAD LORENZ'S RAVEN, raided clotheslines to steal ladies' underwear. Roa had been exploring a neighbor's laundry hung on the line just when he was called. He came, taking a small transportable item with him, a pair of panties. When he got a reward of tasty food, he made the association of panties and food. Henceforth, as expected according to classical conditioning theory, he brought these items on his own to redeem them for savory snacks. — Bernd Heinrich

We simply thought that we would be considerably poorer in Europe if we didn't have the sacred buildings of earlier epochs. It's still possible to experience the Gothic period, not to mention the Romantic. Only nothing remains of the industrial age. So we thought that our photos would give the viewer the chance to go back to a time that is gone forever. — Bernd Becher

Each of the 630 pupae killed by Gambrus hatched not just one wasp but, on average, thirty-three. That is, these pupae represent 630 x 33 = 20,790 individual ichneumon parasitoids, which could potentially produce 20,790 x 33 = 686,000 more parasitoids in the next generation, and this wasp can have more than one generation in a year. One — Bernd Heinrich

Edward Abbey said you must "brew your own beer; kick in you Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it." I already had a good start. As a teenager in rural Maine, after we came to America, I had learned hunting, fishing, and trapping in the wilderness. My Maine mentors had long ago taught me to make home brew. I owned a rifle, and I'd already built a log cabin. The rest should be easy. I thought I'd give it a shot. — Bernd Heinrich

We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking. — Bernd Heinrich

Deep down we are all still runners — Bernd Heinrich

I try not to be a sucker to our natural tendency to seek pleasure and satisfaction, which causes us to believe almost anything that makes us feel better and then deem it "right." But I cannot exclude the possibility that there may be other dimensions to the world aside from the familiar ones and that something lives on beyond my physical self. If so, when I pass on, it will be a celebration for some other beginning and not an end. Even if that is not the case, I have lost nothing and gained much. — Bernd Heinrich

The newspaper, delivered daily to my mailbox, is a convenience I need to help start my fire in the morning. Not wanting to waste anything, I sometimes even read it. — Bernd Heinrich

Bernd had got the scar on his forehead during the battle of Seelow Heights. — Anonymous

Somewhere there is a check on their natural rate of increase, and you can be sure of one thing - that if they could tell us what they wanted at any one time, they would vote to obliterate the forces that hold them in check, the forces that ensure their long-term benefits. And so, probably, would we, if we voted merely on the basis of our individual interests. — Bernd Heinrich

Messi not scoring? Great players aren't only great because of goals. If they don't score, they offer goals to teammates — Bernd Schuster

One of the beautiful things about running is that it is direct and elegant. The formula is simple: put one foot in front of the other. It doesn't take much to figure out that if you want to improve sprint speed, you run faster. If you want to improve distance-running performance, you run farther. — Bernd Heinrich

One evening I came home and there on the couch I found my husband, Tom, with a freshly fledged crow sitting calmly in his lap. They were busy watching Star Trek: The Next Generation; since Captain Jean-Luc Picard was in the middle of an absorbing monologue, they hardly registered my arrival, but finally they both glanced my way, Tom looking a bit sheepish, the crow nibbling bits from a can of gourmet cat food. I thought of something Bernd Heinrich wrote, inspired by his raven studies, "Living with another creature, you naturally feel closer to it the more activities that can be shared, especially important activities like watching TV. — Lyanda Lynn Haupt

We don't agree with the depiction of buildings in the '20s and 1930s. Things were seen either from above or below which tended to monumentalize the object. This was exploited in terms of a socialistic view - a fresh view of the world, a new man, a new beginning. — Bernd Becher

We deny that we are part of the feast and seek to remove ourselves from it, even though we kill and consume animals by the billions and permanently remove the life resources for many more. But not one animal is allowed to consume us, even after we are dead. Not even the worms. We need a new creation story that connects us to nature and to others, one that can give us strength-- that can make us real rather than rich. Nature, religions, and science coincide on the real: kinship with each other and with the mountains and prairies, oceans and forests. — Bernd Heinrich

There is nothing quite so gentle, deep, and irrational as running
and nothing quite so savage, so wild. — Bernd Heinrich