Quotes from Heinrich Heine

Religion cannot sink lower than when somehow it is raised to a state religion ... It becomes then an avowed mistress.

It is extremely difficult for a Jew to be converted for how can he bring himself to believe in the divinity of - another Jew?

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all.

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.

Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.

Terrible as is war, it yet displays the spiritual grandeur of man daring to defy his mightiest hereditary enemy--death.

Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.

Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.

The nightingale appear'd the first, And as her melody she sang, The apple into blossom burst, To life the grass and violets sprang.

It is an ancient story Yet is it ever new.

There are more fools in the world than there are people.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

It is only kindred griefs that draw forth our tears, and each weeps really for himself.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by friction.

The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.

I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.

Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.

In these times we fight for ideas and newspapers are our fortress.

Lyrical poetry is much the same an every age, as the songs of the nightingales in every spring-time.