Quotes from Heinrich Heine

Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men, and rocks them up to manhood; and this meager foster-mother remains their faithful companion throughout life.

Child, you are like a flower,So sweet and pure and fair.I look at you, and sadnessTouches me with a prayer.

I cannot tell why this imaginedDespair has fallen upon me;The ghost of an ancient legendThat will not let me be.

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 Saint John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

I will not say that women have no character rather, they have a new one every day.

Here's to matrimony, the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!

Don't send a poet to London.

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.

Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood.

The future smells of Russian leather, of blood, of godlessness and of much whipping. I advise our grandchildren to come into the world with very thick skin on their backs.

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

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling, and breathe forth their sweetest odours. Flow forth, ye perfumes of my heart, and seek beyond these mountains the dear one of my dreams!

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

Of course he [God] will forgive me; that's his business.

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

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.

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.

I will not mourn, although my heart is torn,Oh, love forever lost! I will not mourn.

On wings of song, my dearest,I will carry you off.

God will forgive me. It's his job.

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

The cloudlets are lazily sailing O'er the blue Atlantic sea.

Christianity is an idea, and as such is indestructible and immortal, like every idea.

Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death.