Kindle - German Wisdom: Humorous, inspirational and thought-provoking quotes by famous Germans

Humorous, inspirational and thought-provoking
quotes by famous Germans.

Collected, translated and edited by
Diana Kindle

Westhoff Publishing

"Aging only scares those women who have nothing to offer besides their looks."
-Inge Meysel

"I can't even comprehend that I'm already half a century old."
-Nena

"It's terrible when you get older. But it's even worse when you don't."
-Heinz Erhardt

"Youth ends when egotism does. Maturity begins when one lives for others."
-Hermann Hesse

"When you're young you want to know everything. When you're old you just want to be young again."
-Harald Schmidt

"You know you're getting old when people start to tell you how young you still look."
-Karl Dall

"When I was younger, I was less tolerant. I became softer with age. I used to make a strict distinction between right and wrong. I was more radical in my thinking, artistically and politically."
-Jrgen Prochnow

"In old age, love is relative. Just like age."
-Gtz George

"Only when you're old do you understand what the word friend really means."
-Heinz Rhmann

"Age does not make us childish, as some say. It finds us true children."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"You're never too old to do something stupid."
-Sabine Christiansen

"Stay true to the dreams of your youth."
-Friedrich Schiller

"America took me into her bosom when there was no longer a country worthy of the name, but in my heart I am German - German in my soul."
-Marlene Dietrich

"In America you can grow old without having to grow up."
-Thomas Gottschalk

"I have been a huge fan of America, as I find their way of life there is pretty unique, and I have enjoyed a lot of good times over there."
-Michael Schumacher

"Food is always a problem for Americans. Either they think it causes cancer, or they're worried they'll get fat."
-Thomas Gottschalk

"Americans think that without them we would be a Soviet republic today. But I think without us Europeans, they would still be Native Americans over there."
-Harald Schmidt

"The difference between Germany and America? The dimensions. When I meet up with someone in Germany, I'm usually too early, because the distances are much shorter than in Los Angeles. That city has a diameter of 100 kilometers. "
-Jrgen Prochnow

"In Tansania as well as in the USA, people spend an average of 70 minutes per day getting from point A to point B and back. The only progress: In the USA, people travel 60 kilometers by car, while most people in Tansania walk on foot."
-Eckart von Hirschhausen

"I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime."
-Albert Einstein

"American censorship dumbs everything down to a childlike level. If there is anything intellectually challenging in a book, you can be sure that some ignorant bible-thumping redneck soccer mom will find it offensive and try to have it banned."
-Oliver Gaspirtz

"It's no coincidence that anywhere where intelligence is seen as a threat, books are banned and newspapers, magazines and the media are being censored."
-Heinrich Bll

"American TV is worse than German TV. We may have less stations, but we have more variety."
-Frank Elstner

"I find American politics incomprehensible. When a 12-year-old in chains is brought before a judge because he supposedly touched his sister in an indecent manner, my stomach turns. Or the gun laws: I will never understand that there is one massacre after another and the majority does not respond with a radical change in their pro-gun thinking, but with panic buying of automatic weapons. That's why I wanted to gain citizenship: to be able to vote against those people who would rather give guns to teachers than outlaw automatic weapons."
-Jrgen Prochnow

"Whoever looks at America will see: the ship is powered by stupidity, corruption, or prejudice."
-Alice Schwarzer

"There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."
-Otto von Bismarck

"It's hard to believe that McDonald's has declining profits, when the US army keeps opening up new markets."
-Harald Schmidt

"Let me say this on a personal note. Without the United States of America, I would in all probability not be able to stand here before you today."
-Angela Merkel

"The United States is our most important ally. They helped us many times. Without the United States, the unification or German democratisation after the Nazi period would have been much more complicated, or almost impossible."
-Joschka Fischer

"If we remind ourselves of the fact that every fifth American today rightly, and perhaps also with a certain degree of pride, points to his or her German ancestry, we can safely say that we, indeed, share common roots."
-Angela Merkel

"God thinks in geniuses, dreams in poets and sleeps in the rest of us."
-Konrad Adenauer

"Ordinary people are products of their environment and fit in. Artists transcend their environment and stand out."
-Oliver Gaspirtz

"No doubt the artist is the child of his time. But woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite."
-Friedrich Schiller

"In art it's very important not to be liked but to express your own convictions."
-David Garrett

"Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time."
-Karl Marx

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Life is serious. Art is joyful."
-Friedrich Schiller

"Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises."
-Gnter Grass

"Art is anarchy."
-Heinrich Bll

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized."
-Adolf Hitler

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it."
-Bertholt Brecht

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"We amuse ourselves by painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"To provoke means to evoke something. By making a sculpture with fat or a piece of clay I evoke something. I ignite a thought within me - a totally original, totally new thought that has never yet existed in history, even if I deal with a historical fact or with Leonardo or Rembrandt. I myself determine history - it is not history that determines me... every man is a potential provocateur."