German Philosopher Quotes & Sayings

To mention a colorful example, the nineteenth-century German scientist Karl Vogt once wrote that "thoughts stand in the same relation to the brain as gall does to the liver or urine to the kidneys." When he expressed this idea in public, a philosopher interjected that the longer one listens to Professor Vogt, the more one tends to believe him. Clearly, more sophisticated ideas and models are in demand. — Gary F. Marcus

I suggest this passage from the German "philosopher" (this passage was detected, translated, and reviled by Karl Popper): Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e. - heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten and or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound. Even a Monte Carlo engine could not sound as random as the great philosophical master thinker (it would take plenty of sample runs to get the mixture of "heat" and "sound." People call that philosophy and frequently finance it with taxpayer subsidies! — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

She was not quite what you would call refined.
She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot. — Mark Twain

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, "Writers should use common words to say uncommon things." When — Mary Embree

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

All nature, then, as self-sustained, consists
Of twain of things: of bodies and of void
In which they're set, and where they're moved around. — Lucretius

There can be no Swaraj where there is no harmony, no music. — Mahatma Gandhi

I'd like to make music for as long as I can; it feels like something I need to do. — Laura Marling

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't. — Kurt Vonnegut

I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A — H.G.Wells

Few people realize that the Bible discourages people from studying foreign languages. They story of the tower of Babel informs us that there is one humanity (God's one), only that "our languages are confused." That has always meant that, say, any German philosopher could know exactly what the Chinese people were thinking, only that he couldn't understand them. So instead of learning the foreign language, he demanded a translation. — Thorsten J. Pattberg

MONAD, n. The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter (see Molecule). The monad has body without bulk, and mind without manifestation - containing all the powers and possibilities needful to his evolution into a German philosopher . — Ambrose Bierce

And involuntarily I compared the childish sarcasm, the religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresistible irony of the German philosopher whose influence is henceforth ineffaceable. — Guy De Maupassant

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. — Terry Eagleton

The word ecology, coined by the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (initially as oecology) in 1866. derives from the Greek oikos, "referring originally to the family household and its daily operations and maintenance." The term ecology is therefore intended to refer to the study of the conditions of existence that pertain to, and the interactions between, all the entities that make up our larger, cosmic household here upon earth. — Warwick Fox

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. — Johann G. Hamann

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said that what he resented in most Christians was what he perceived as a constant underlying resentment: (1) a denied resentment toward God for demanding sacrifice, (2) toward others for not appreciating our sacrifice, (3) sacrificing as much as we sacrifice, (4) and a resentment toward others for not having to do it! — Richard Rohr

In the interview, Roger reflected how the German philosopher Nietzsche said a man can undergo torture if he knows the why of his life. But I, here at Dachau, learned something far greater. I learned to know the Who of my life. He was enough to sustain me then, and is enough to sustain me still — Ken Dignan

A German philosopher once wrote that he who fights monsters must take care that he doesn't become one himself. — Anthony Horowitz

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit. — Robertson Davies

I'd be lying if I said
you make me speechless
the truth is you make my
tongue so weak it forgets
what language to speak in. — Rupi Kaur

To my surprise, I find the most relevant commentary on a marriage that continues into the sunset years comes from the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an atypically practical frame of mind, wrote, 'When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everthing else in marriage is transitory. — Daniel Klein

The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others - usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself. — Louis MacNeice

There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don't have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure. — John Cage

As a matter of fact, we put it down because we wanted to be jazz pickers. — Charlie Rich

For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, "He who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing." Let us, then, dip briefly into that abyss, with full assurance that we will not come up empty-handed. For, as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, nothing find. — Jim Holt

He said that the only decent German philosopher was Lichtenberg, who was less a philosopher than the ultimate jokester and clown. — Roberto Bolano

Why we can't remember when our mothers carried us inside them: the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one. — Marie Rutkoski

As a German philosopher writing in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, Marcuse understood the sleep inducing force of indoctrination, its power to make people forget and forfeit their own real interests. "The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible," he wrote. "The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful." — Daniel Pinchbeck

The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of reality. The right side of your brain, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. Your left brain is a scientist,. Your right brain is an artist.
People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into the conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over a flash, just an instant, and gives them access to divine inspiration. A flash inspiration. A moment of insight.
According to German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom all people over all time. — Chuck Palahniuk

The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Painters ... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds. — William Hazlitt