Meaning of Life Perspectives in Germany

"The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness."

"The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of tyranny, is to make the private into the public."

"Is life not a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?"

"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."

"Moral law within. Starry heaven above."

"The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what one pays for it well."

"To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence."

"To think for oneself is to question, to be critical, to discern the truth from falsehood."

"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free."

"Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that one had as a child at play."

"All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?"

"Political freedom, for me, means the right to participate in public affairs, or the right to share in the power that rules the country."

"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals."

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

"The world is hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it."

"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarian movements themselves."

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

"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking up what is of no importance at any given time."

"The act of beginning, of bringing something new into the world, is the very essence of human freedom."

"There are no facts, only interpretations."

"Live your life as if your every act were to become a universal law."

"The most dangerous illness of a republic is not corruption or demagoguery, but the absence of citizens."

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

"Happiness is merely the absence of suffering."

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

"Compassion is the basis of all morality."

"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."

"Become what you are."

"Understanding means being able to articulate a response to what one is confronted with."

"Mostly, it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things."

"So act as if your maxims should be transformed into a universal law of nature."

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe."

"Genius is the ability to independently arrive at new and truly original ideas on a matter, without instruction."

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

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."

"Will is the thing-in-itself."

"Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood."

"Wherever people are, there is the possibility of a world."

"The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will."

"No one has the right to obey."

"To live alone is the fate of all great souls."

"Invisible threads are the strongest ties."

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

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

"The world is my representation."

"The problem with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, but were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal."

"Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind."

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

"Man is the only animal that causes pain to others without any purpose other than to do so."