German Philosophy Quotes

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking, and observing, there we enter the realm of art and science

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago

To will pure nothingness is to will oneself, because only thus is one truly free

Nothing great has ever been accomplished without passion

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster

All rational knowledge is either formal or material; the former is logic, the latter, if it is limited to certain objects of knowledge, is natural science; if it is directed to the laws of freedom, it is moral science

Truth is not found by merely opening one's eyes, but by measuring the shadows that things cast upon the soul

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills

Only in the mirror of the other does the self truly find itself

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses his life can undergo, the more he can remember, the more creative will be his actions

Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things

The task of thinking is not to solve but to endure questions that undo the answers

The highest, most decisive experience is to stand alone in silence, awaiting the hidden, mysterious, ineffable revelation

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind

No one ever regards the things before his feet, but he gazes at the stars

Nothing is holy to the dogmatist but his dogma

We do not regard what is beautiful as beautiful, so much as what is habitual as beautiful

The hardest thing to learn is to see which bridge to cross and which to burn

Man is a product of nature, which in its blind necessity produces him, but he can become free by recognizing this necessity

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present knows nothing of the age in which he lives

Every real progress of the human spirit is the result of a new audacity of imagination

For each philosophy creates its own language, and thus a new eye through which the world reveals itself

The more we cultivate the arts, the less we are dominated by crude instincts, and the more we become truly free

Reason is nothing but the capacity to enlarge the rules of understanding until they are adequate to reality

What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do

What we do not understand we do not possess

The subject must be its own work of art

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world

To be is to do

Being determines consciousness

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

Compassion is the basis of morality

What we call freedom is only the negation of what limits us

There are no facts, only interpretations

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself

Mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational

Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced

Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants

History does nothing; it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that

I had to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith

Language is the house of being

Man is free, but he finds his law in his own heart

The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, while being denied the rest

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star

The ego is not master in its own house

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does

Man is free in his dreams, and often finds the truth in them

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky

Without risk, faith is an impossibility

The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying

To be conscious of being, you need another being to whisper to you your own existence

Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself

The greater the doubt, the greater the awakening

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time

Every word is already an interpretation

Thinking in contradictions is the soul of all dialectics

Every limitation is also an opening, every horizon an invitation

We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great

Being is time; time is finite, therefore, being is finite

Man’s ultimate resource is to turn necessity into virtue

Only a being who can question its own being can truly comprehend

Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you must allure the senses to it

We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without

Interpretation is not a subsidiary activity of understanding, but a fundamental mode of being of human life itself

What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth

The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced

To do is to be; to be is to do; but above all, to become is the true movement of the spirit

A thought, once uttered, is a lie

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

Knowledge is not a matter of objects standing before us but a matter of our own participation in the world

From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made

All phenomena are determined by the forms of our own intuition

I am not simply the result of what has happened to me, but of what I choose to become

Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion

Guilt is the echo of freedom withholding consent to what one becomes

The more one judges, the less one loves

Man is not the product of what he has, but of what he does

Have the courage to make use of your own intellect

The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees

To demand clarity at any price is to misunderstand the nature of thought

We are never really at home in the present moment; our mind is always searching for a foothold in the past or the future

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

The highest form of reason is to recognize necessity; the lowest, to deny it

He who does not hope to win has already lost

Even the purest soul sits in shadow when it forgets to marvel at the everyday

He who does not wish to reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love remains alone

Personality is that which is last acquired and least inherited

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made

To will is to will an end, but to will an end is also to will the means

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything

Freedom is the consciousness of necessity

The world is my representation

The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid

Faith is the night in which all cows are black

Spirit is at war with itself; it must overcome itself as its most formidable obstacle

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized: in the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident

To be oneself, one must first see oneself reflected in the mirror of the world

The great epochs in our lives are at the points when we gain courage to re-baptize our evil qualities as our best qualities

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering

There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees

Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are

To will freedom for oneself is nothing; to will it for others is everything

Even the purest light casts a shadow

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises

The true mark of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination

Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness

Fear is the original emotion, from which all understanding departs

The essence of spirit is self-development; its end is freedom

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large

To err is to create; only through error does one learn what is new

He who desires to philosophize must first of all be able to wonder

The mind is like an enchanted garden, whose walls are the limits of our understanding and whose paths wind ever onward with each question we pose