Herder Quotes & Sayings

Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Christ proclaimed: "I am the good shepherd." He then further showed, and with eloquent exactness, the difference between a shepherd and a hireling herder. The one has personal interest in and love for his flock, and knows each sheep by name, the other knows them only as a flock, the value of which is gaged by number; to the hireling they are only as so many or so much. While the shepherd is ready to fight in defense of his own, and if necessary even imperil his life for his sheep, the hireling flees when the wolf approaches, leaving the way open for the ravening beast to scatter, rend, and kill. — James E. Talmage

It is a hard but good law of fate, that as every evil, so every excessive power, wears itself out. — Johann Gottfried Herder

It is greatly understated to compare humans to an absorbent sponge, a glowing fuse; they are each an innumerable harmony, a living self that has an effect on all of the forces that surround them. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Why you no good, scruffy looking, nerf herder! — George Lucas

We see so much that we in fact see nothing, and we know so much that we no longer possess anything that is our own, that is to say, something we could not have learned, something that arises out of the virtues and errors of our own self — Johann Gottfried Herder

The savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species — Johann Gottfried Herder

Touch not the flute when drums are sounding around; when fools have the word, the wise will be silent. — Johann Gottfried Herder

You're not a soldier, boy. You're not like your brothers. You're a herder. Your life is here. — Morgan Rice

You people in all parts of the world, who have passed away over the ages, you did not live only to fertilize the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your descendants could become happy through European culture — Johann Gottfried Herder

Jeronimo, my grandfather, swine-herder and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again. To truly appreciate life we must remember that nothing lasts for ever and take nothing we enjoy for granted. In so doing we stay grateful and happy for all our good fortune. — Jose Saramago

The working of revolutions misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Drone strikes, Albert Camus would argue, are not just meant to kill. They are programmed to terrorize. In this regard, whether the missile strikes its intended target or incinerates a goat-herder and his flock is incidental. In fact, the occasional killing of civilians may well be a desired outcome since collateral deaths intensify the fear. This is punishment by example, not for any particular crime or impending threat, but merely because of who you are, where you live, what you might believe. These new circuitries of death are meant to humiliate, subdue and dehumanize. — Jeffrey St. Clair

A behavior has occurred that is good, bad, or ambiguous. How have cultural factors stretching back to the origins of humans contributed to that behavior? And rustling cattle on a moonless night; or setting aside tending your cassava garden to raid your Amazonian neighbours; or building fortifications; or butchering every man, woman, and child in a village is irrelevant to that question. That's because all these study subjects are pastoralists, agriculturalists, or horticulturalists, lifestyles that emerged only in the last ten thousand to fourteen thousand years, after the domestication of plants and animals. In the context of hominin history stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, being a camel herder or farmer is nearly as newfangled as being a lobbyist advocating for legal rights for robots. For most of history, humans have been hunter-gatherers, a whole different kettle of fish. — Robert M. Sapolsky

It is easier to make a lady of a peasant-girl than a peasant-girl of a lady. — Johann Gottfried Herder

The craving for a delicate fruit is pleasanter than the fruit itself. — Johann Gottfried Herder

The friend who holds up before me the mirror, conceals not my smallest faults, warns me kindly, reproves me affectionately, when I have not performed my duty, he is my friend, however little he may appear so. But if a man praises and lauds me, never reproves me, overlooks my faults, and forgives them before I have repented, he is my enemy, however much he may appear my friend. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Have you never observed that children will sometimes, of a sudden, give utterance to ideas which makes us wonder how they got possession of them? Which presuppose a long series of other ideas and secret self-communings? Which break forth like a full stream out of the earth, an infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment from a few raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed beneath the ground? — Johann Gottfried Herder

To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Whoever perseveres will be crowned. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's. — John McWhorter

Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking Nerf herder. — George Lucas

Thus we build on the ice, thus we write on the waves of the sea; the waves roaring pass away, the ice melts, and away goes our palace, like our thoughts. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Nothing in Nature stands still; everything strives and moves forward. If we could only view the first stages of creation, how the kingdoms of nature were built one upon the other, a progression of forward-striving forces would reveal itself in all evolution. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Teaching sometimes seems like not one profession, but every profession. We ask them to be doctor and diplomat, calf-herder, map-maker, wizard and watchman, electricians of the mind. — Nancy Gibbs

All our science calculates with abstracted individual external marks, which do not touch the inner existence of any single thing — Johann Gottfried Herder

The roots of the deepest love die in the heart, if not tenderly cherished. — Johann Gottfried Herder

India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop. — Lin Yutang

It seemed there was an announcement every five minutes from the mythical conductor, imparting sagacious gems such as "large items should be placed in the overhead luggage racks", or that "passengers should report any unattended items to the train crew as soon as possible". I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon? — Gail Honeyman

In any case I would cut myself a path to the throne even if some bastard-born herder had fathered me on a gutter-whore - genealogy can work for me or I can cut down the family tree and make a battering ram. Either way is good. — Mark Lawrence

So says the most ancient book of the Earth; thus it is written on its leaves of marble, lime, sand, slate, and clay: ... that our Earth has fashioned itself, from its chaos of substances and powers, through the animating warmth of the creative spirit, to a peculiar and original whole, by a series of preparatory revolutions, till at last the crown of its creation, the exquisite and tender creature man, was enabled to appear. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Man is a central creature between the animals, that is to say, the most perfect form, which unites the traits of all in the most complete epitome. — Johann Gottfried Herder

The universal dress of philosophy and philanthropy can conceal repression, violations of the true personal, human,
local, civil, and national freedom — Johann Gottfried Herder

Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks. — Johann Gottfried Von Herder

A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Those that embrace the entire universe with love, for the most part love nothing, but their narrow selves. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Brave is the lion tamer, brave is the world subduer, but braver is the one who has subdued himself. — Johann Gottfried Herder

As the shadow in early morning, is friendship with the wicked; it dwindles hour by hour. But friendship with the good increases, like the evening shadows, till the sun of life sets. — Johann Gottfried Herder

They knew each other's names. He knew she loved to dance. She knew he was a herder of goats. But there is another kind of meeting...the meeting of eye and eye, and spirit and spirit. — Josephina Niggli

Jesus Christ is, in the noblest and most perfect sense, the realized ideal of humanity. — Johann Gottfried Herder

Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own "measure" is his way of putting it. This idea has entered very deep into modern consciousness. It is also new. Before the late eighteenth century no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance. — Charles Taylor

Calmly take what ill betideth; Patience wins the crown at length: Rich repayment him abideth Who endures in quiet strength. Brave the tamer of the lion; Brave whom conquered kingdoms praise; Bravest he who rules his passions, Who his own impatience sways. — Johann Gottfried Herder

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self. — Johann Gottfried Herder

The people need a master only as long as they have no understanding of their own. The more it acquires understanding, the more the government is bound to change its methods and to disappear. The most noble end of government is to become dispensable, so that everyone must govern himself. — Johann Gottfried Herder