Inspirational German Quotes & Sayings

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said
"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love
and I'm sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other? — Elizabeth Alexander

I make napkins talk in restaurants, socks talk on car journeys. There is an awful lot of puppetry going on in the house. — Nina Conti

The reason there are so many tree-lined boulevards in Paris is so the German army can march in the shade. — George S. Patton

A box is more a coffin for the human spirit than an inspiration. — Frank Lloyd Wright

No matter how much I think, no matter how much I try, I can't fill this void of loneliness in my heart. — Auliq Ice

When you pray for others you're praying for yourself. — Okisha Jackson

Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden. — William Shenstone

Well, I think that everybody is kind of a nerd at heart. — Simon Helberg

Reverence for life, veneratio vitae, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live. — Albert Schweitzer

Wanderlust, the very strong or irresistible impulse to travel, is adopted untouched from the German, presumably because it couldn't be improved upon. Workarounds like the French passion du voyage don't quite capture the same meaning. Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly; it's something more animal and more fickle - something more like lust. We don't lust after many things in life. We don't need words like worklust or homemakinglust. — Elisabeth Eaves

We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor's yard. — Richard M. Nixon

You must be careful never to allow doubt to paralyze you. always take the decisions you need to take, even if you're not sure you're doing the right thing. You'll never go wrong if, when you make a decision, you keep in mind an old German proverb: 'The devil is in the detail.' Remember that proverb and you'll always be able to turn a wrong decision into a right one. — Paulo Coelho

Believing in the inherent good of humankind is akin to having faith. It is to believe in something that may not be readily apparent. — Charles F. Glassman

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping.
'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?'
'Yes, God has blessed me with all these children,' the rabbi replied.
'Haven't you heard about the population problem?'the woman sniffed. 'How many more children do you want to have?'
Rabbi Teller paused and looked the woman in the eye: 'About 6 million,' he said. — Lynn Vincent

Hi, my name is Kurt Cobain, I'm homosexual, I'm a pagan, I'm a drug abuser, and I like to fuck pot-bellied pigs! — Kurt Cobain

It felt as if a shaft of lightning had gone in through one ear and out the other...Armies of dead men went marching through my head. I heard a noise like a cosmic scream. My brain turned to ice. Then the ice cracked in all directions and disintegrated into tiny particles like snowflakes, and each snowflake was afflicted by a pain of its very own. In the end, everything went black. I found myself looking out into the universe. Seated on a diminutive planet made of glass was a red dwarf who had twelve important messages for me. — Walter Moers

That was something that I learned: It's actually okay if the way that I do my best is when I'm treated well. — Jenny Slate