Heinrich Heine Quotes

#1. The people have no ear, either for rhythm or music, and their unnatural passion for pianoforte playing and singing is thus all the more repulsive. There is nothing on earth more terrible than English music, except English painting. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#2. The beauteous dragonfly's dancing By the waves of the rivulet glancing; She dances here and she dances there, The glimmering, glittering flutterer fair. Full many a beetle with loud applause Admires her dress of azure gauze, Admires her body's bright splendour, And also her figure so slender ... - Author: Heinrich Heine

#3. Out of my great sorrows, I make little songs. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#4. Religion cannot sink lower than when somehow it is raised to a state religion ... It becomes then an avowed mistress. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#5. When words leave off, music begins. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#6. The spring's already at the gate With looks my care beguiling; The country round appeareth straight A flower-garden smiling. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#7. But that age ... exerts on us
An almost terrible charm,
Like the memory of things seen
And a life lived in dreams. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#8. The nightingale appear'd the first, And as her melody she sang, The apple into blossom burst, To life the grass and violets sprang. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#9. Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#10. It is an ancient story
Yet is it ever new. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#11. I consider it a degradation and a stain on my honor to submit to baptism in order to qualify myself for state employment in Prussia. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#12. I have smelt all the aromas there are in the fragrant kitchen they call Earth; and what we can enjoy in this life, I surely have enjoyed just like a lord! - Author: Heinrich Heine

#13. When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#14. Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature's grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#15. God will forgive me. It's his job. Heine said this on his deathbed (1856). Hilarious. He must have thought that up years before and counted the seconds to use it. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#16. The foolish race of mankind are swarming below in the night; they shriek and rage and quarrel - and all of them are right. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#17. Whether a revolution succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#18. God will forgive me the foolish remarks I have made about Him just as I will forgive my opponents the foolish things they have written about me, even though they are spiritually as inferior to me as I to thee, O God! - Author: Heinrich Heine

#19. Where books are burnt, men finish up being burnt too. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#20. Freedom is a new religion, the religion of our time. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#21. I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#22. Silence is the essential condition of happiness. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#23. He that marries is like the dogs who was married to the Adriatic. He knows not what there is in that which he marries; mayhap treasures and pearls, mayhap monsters and tempests, await him. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#24. Human misery is too great for men to do without faith. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#25. Where one burns books, there one eventually burns people. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#26. Graves they say are warm'd by glory;
Foolish words and empty story. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#27. I live, which is the main point. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#28. Thought precedes action as lighting does thunder. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#29. It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#30. With the rose the butterfly's deep in love,
A thousand times hovering round;
But round himself, all tender like gold,
The sun's sweet ray is hovering found. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#31. Jews who long have drifted from the faith of their fathers ... are stirred in their inmost parts when the old, familiar Passover sounds chance to fall upon their ears. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#32. The sun's sweet ray is hovering discovered. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#33. Wherever people burn books, there, finally, they will also burn people. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#34. The sea appears all golden. Beneath the sun-lit sky. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#35. The fountain of love is the rose and the lily, the sun and the dove. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#36. Oh what lies there are in kisses! And their guile so well prepared! Sweet the snaring is; but this is Sweeter still, to be ensnared. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#37. I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that I was reading on, so I awoke from sheer boredom. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#38. The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#39. At Dresden on the Elbe, that handsome city,
Where straw hats, verses, and cigars are made,
They've built (it well may make us feel afraid,)
A music club and music warehouse pretty. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#40. God has given us speech in order that we may say pleasant things to our friends, and tell bitter truths to our enemies. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#41. It is a common phenomenon that just the prettiest girls find it so difficult to get a man. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#42. A pine tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.
It dreameth of a Palm tree
Which far in the East alone,
In the mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#43. Every age has its problem, by solving which humanity is helped forward. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#44. There is only one writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It is Shakespeare. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#45. If one has no heart, one cannot write for the masses. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#46. That was only the beginning - where one burns books, one will finally also burn people. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#47. The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#48. Good Luck is a giddy maid,
Fickle and restless as a fawn;
She smooths your hair; and then the jade
Kisses you quickly, and is gone. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#49. Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on Christ. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#50. Sweet May hath come to love us,
Flowers, trees, their blossoms don;
And through the blue heavens above us
The very clouds move on. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#51. Wherever a great soul utters its thoughts, there is Golgatha. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#52. Like a great poet, nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#53. The lotus flower is troubled
At the sun's resplendent light;
With sunken head and sadly
She dreamily waits for the night. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#54. If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#55. God will pardon: That's His business. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#56. The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#57. Perfumes are the feelings of flowers. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#58. In the image of the lion made He kittens small and curious. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#59. Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#60. So we keep asking, over and over
Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths-
But is that an answer? - Author: Heinrich Heine

#61. Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#62. Every woman is the gift of a world to me. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#63. The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#64. Das war ein vorspeil nur; That was only a prelude; dort wo man Buecher verbrennt, Where one burns books, vebrennt man auch am Ende One will also burn people Menchen. Eventually. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#65. Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#66. The Bible is the great family chronicle of the Jews. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#67. She resembles the Venus de Milo: she is very old, has no teeth, and has white spots on her yellow skin. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#68. Laughter is wholesome. God is not so dull as some people make out. Did not He make the kitten to chase its tail. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#69. And yonder sits a maiden, The fairest of the fair, With gold in her garment glittering, And she combs her golden hair. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#70. Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#71. He only profits from praise who values criticism. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#72. Oh, they loved dearly: their souls kissed, they kissed with their eyes, they were both but one single kiss. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#73. Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#74. The beauteous eyes of the spring's fair night With comfort are downward gazing. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#75. High in the air rises the forest of oaks, high over the oaks soar the eagle, high over the eagle sweep the clouds, high over the clouds gleam the stars ... high over the stars sweep the angels ... - Author: Heinrich Heine

#76. Our sweetest hopes rise blooming. And then again are gone, They bloom and fade alternate, And so it goes rolling on. I know it, and it troubles My life, my love, my rest, My heart is wise and witty, And it bleeds within my breast. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#77. I have sown Dragon's teeth and reaped only fleas. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#78. Pretty women without religion are like flowers without perfume. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#79. Lyrical poetry is much the same an every age, as the songs of the nightingales in every spring-time. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#80. Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#81. While we are indifferent to our good qualities, we keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we come to look on them as virtues. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#82. Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#83. You should only attempt to borrow from those who have but few of this world's goods, as their chests are not of iron, and they are, besides, anxious to appear wealthier than they really are. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#84. Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by friction. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#85. With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#86. Nothing is more futile than theorizing about music. No doubt there are laws, mathematically strict laws, but these laws are not music; they are only its conditions? The essence of music is revelation. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#87. Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#88. Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#89. Woman is at once apple and serpent. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#90. Man,
the aristocrat amongst the animals. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#91. Christianity is an idea, and as such is indestructible and immortal, like every idea. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#92. In action, the English have the advantage enjoyed by free men always entitled to free discussion: of having a ready judgment on every question. We Germans, on the other hand, are always thinking. We think so much that we never form a judgment. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#93. He who fears to venture as far as his heart urges and his reason permits, is a coward; he who ventures further than he intended to go, is a slave. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#94. Atheism is the last word of theism. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#95. A blaspheming Frenchman is a spectacle more pleasing to the Lord than a praying Englishman. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#96. As the moon's fair image quaketh In the raging waves of ocean, Whilst she, in the vault of heaven, Moves with silent peaceful motion. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#97. I do not murmur, even if my heart break. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#98. Where words leave off, music begins. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#99. There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work. - Author: Heinrich Heine

#100. The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind. - Author: Heinrich Heine