J.F Hermann Quotes

A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.

Love is like death. It is fulfillment and an evening after which nothing more may follow.

The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.

Heaven is angered by my arrogance; my proof [of the four-color theorem] is also defective.

Black is real sensation, even if it is produced by entire absence of light. The sensation of black is distinctly different from the lack of all sensations.

Before one can generalize, formalize, and axiomatize, there must be a mathematical substance.

To be happy is not the purpose of our being, but to deserve happiness.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.

I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.

Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.

Time is that which is manufactured by clocks.

A theory is scientific only if it can be disproved. But the moment you try to cover absolutely everything the chances are that you cover nothing.

An observer situated in a nebula and moving with the nebula will observe the same properties of the universe as any other similarly situated observer at any time.

What's important is promising something to the people, not actually keeping those promises. The people have always lived on hope alone.

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them

Kitsch generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism.

While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface . . .

Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.

The constant flux and caprice of mental events do not admit of the establishment of stable experimental conditions.

In the beginning [Hitler] was genial and pleasant. He would have extraordinary willpower and unheard-of influence on people.

It is hardly possible to estimate how many marriages fail to prosper or are actually ruined because the man lacks any inkling of the art of love.

All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.

A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live.

What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life

I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.

There is a miracle in every new beginning

Knowledge can communicated but not wisdom.

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.

Who travels far will often see things Far removed from what was believed as Truth.

That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.

I can think. I can wait. I can fast.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?

For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.

When you have won everything in your career, what's left? Why go on?

I sat down with my trainers to check my past seasons and to see what could be done to keep me motivated and in good shape. I had to find a new motivation, a new momentum.

I have a strong lead so far, and I would be proud to win it because it remains the summit for a skier. I also aim to collect several smaller crystal trophies at Are, especially the GS Cup.

In the United States, I am often addressed as a doctor. I should like to point out, however, that I am not such and shall never think of becoming one.

Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications.

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

Our mathematics of the last few decades has wallowed in generalities and formalizations.

You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.

A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth.

I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.

...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.

You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.

Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.