Top 1200 German Philosopher Quotes & Sayings

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

I studied German at school. I lived in Berlin for two years and had a German girlfriend for five years, so I don't find speaking German particularly difficult. Singing was slightly more difficult.

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.

To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

The German people of today bear no guilt. Why are the German people not permitted the right to defend themselves? Why are the crimes of one group emphasized so greatly, instead of highlighting the great German cultural heritage? Why should the Germans not have the right to express their opinion freely?

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 . .

All German women are beautiful. It's not for nothing that we talk of the German "Fräuleinwunder." You don't get this word in any other language.

Jacob is a German Shepherd. (I have never understood why they aren't called German Sheepdogs. What do the Germans call shepherds?)

My grandparents were born in England but spoke German and had a German name.

When Marx, in the Theses on Feuerbach, says that only idealism up to now has understood the active side of material Praxis, what he says is more true of Fichte than of any other philosopher in the classical German tradition.

There is nothing false or arrogant about German pride in German technical and business skills.

I always thought those World War II films with German people speaking English with German accents was weird.

Sometimes when a philosopher's views are widely rejected by the world, the fault is not with the philosopher but with the world.

If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’

But as a German - and I am German-born - we Germans are condemned once again to be radical revisionists.

As Kant says, the contribution of any common laborer would be greater than that of the greatest philosopher unless the philosopher makes some contribution to establishing the rights of humanity.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

And another thing about German symphonic development. I tell you, our cold kvass soup is a horror to the Germans, and yet we eat it with pleasure. And their cold cherry soup is a horror to us, and yet it sends a German into ecstacy. In short, symphonic development is just like German philosophy and soup-all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with some reasoning.

I feel very German - and who can make himself a judge over what is German and what is not - in my ideas and the ideas of my spiritual brothers of German origin.

My grandmother was German. She didn't teach any of her children German. She really wanted them to be American. And now, she's since passed away, I get so frustrated sometimes. I'm like, "Oh, Oma, why didn't you teach your kids German?" My dad would have spoken German to me from birth, and I would have spoken German.

As a German citizen, as a German professor, and as a political person, I hold it to be not only my right but also my moral duty to take part in the shaping of our German destiny, to expose and oppose obvious wrongs.

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

I like the idea of being a postmodern moral philosopher - or perhaps a perverse moral philosopher.

One day I heard a speech of Hitler. In this speech he said that the German factory worker and the German labourer must make common cause with the German intellectual worker.

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

I did that all the more, if I may say so, because I was aware of the fact that there is an inclination to go to extremes in German people, and in the German character generally.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.

German militarism and Nazism have devastated twice in our generation the lands of German neighbors.

what is a german? to say a man is a german, what is that? does it tell you if he is a good man? or a bad man? no, my friend, it tells you nothing about a man to say he is german. a man must think what he is inside. what he is on the outside, how can this matter?

There is a denial of the value of the individual. Christianity affirms the value of each individual soul. Nazism denies it. The individual is sacrificed to the idol of the German Leader, German State or the German race. The ordinary citizen is allowed to hear and think only as the rulers decree.

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

I've always argued that it is just as desirable, just as possible, to have philosopher plumbers as philosopher kings.

I'm into all things German. Everything that I own is German. As far as cars go, anyway.

In order to pass the time I told him the story of the German who ate the other German whom he’d met on the internet.

I definitely won't play the bad German, the Nazi German, here in Hollywood or wherever.

.. 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.

I must say to you that my intensions for instance doing German, it is because Victoria de los Angeles is nothing to do with wanting to be like a German singer.

Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.

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.

German is more familiar now since I live part of the year in Rome and part in the German part of Switzerland. But it's not difficult to sing in German; it's difficult to feel in German. This takes time. It's a culture.

Hitler was no inexorable product of a German 'special path', no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology. Nor was he a mere 'accident' in the course of German history.

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

We have made it possible, without gold and without foreign exchange, to maintain the value of the German mark. Behind the German mark stands the German capacity for work, while some foreign countries, suffocated by gold, have been compelled to devalue their currencies.

No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.

Though German art can never be Bavarian, but simply German, yet Munich is the capital of this German Art; here, under shelter of a Prince who kindles my enthusiasm, to feel myself a native and member of the people was, to me, the homeless wanderer, a deep, a genuine need.

Religion and race belong together. German man can only assimilate religious faith and religious thought with a German mind and in a German way. We must not think we can come to God except through our Volk....Wherever our blood rises in protest we act immorally, even though others may try to prove it to be moral.

My wife is German, so I know something about German energy policy.

Americans and British respondents don't want to let the German people off the hook. They make the case that if you get rid of Hitler, some other leader apart from Hitler would have emerged and, because of the structural constant of German nationalism, would have exploited German national feeling and produce the same kind of events no matter what.

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.

With every wish to take Europe forward with a German-French nucleus, the proposals must always fit with German interests.

The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

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.

When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.

Who lives as a citizen, may write as a philosopher - but write as a philosopher, it is to teach materialism!