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Action(s)
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Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
-Heinrich Heine
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Adaptability
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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.
-Heinrich Heine
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Boredom
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I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
-Heinrich Heine
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Censorship
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Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
-Heinrich Heine
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Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.
-Heinrich Heine
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Crying
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Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.
-Heinrich Heine
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Dreams
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I wept in my dreams.
I dreamed you lay in the grave;
I awoke, and the tears
still poured down my cheeks.
I wept in my dreams,
I dreamed you had left me;
I awoke and I went on weeping
long and bitterly.
I wept in my dreams,
I dreamed you were still kind to me;
I awoke, and still
the flow of my tears streams on.
-Heinrich Heine
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Experience
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Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.
-Heinrich Heine
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Fight, Fighting
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The foolish race of mankind are swarming below in the night; they shriek and rage and quarrel -- and all of them are right.
-Heinrich Heine
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Flowers
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The lotus flower is troubled
At the sun's resplendent light;
With sunken head and sadly
She dreamily waits for the night.
-Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs--Lyrical Interlude (no. 10)
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Genius
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Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
-Heinrich Heine
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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There are more fools in the world than there are people.
-Heinrich Heine
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Impermanence
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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.
-Heinrich Heine, City of Lucca
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Kisses
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Oh what lies lurk in kisses!
-Heinrich Heine
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Language
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If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.
-Heinrich Heine
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Marriage
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Matrimony is the high sea for which no compass has yet to be invented.
-Heinrich Heine
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News
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In these times we fight for ideas and newspapers are our fortress.
-Heinrich Heine
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Politics
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In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.
-Heinrich Heine
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Revolution
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Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.
-Heinrich Heine
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Seasons
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In the marvellous month of May
when all the buds were bursting,
then in my heart did
love arise.
In the marvellous month of May
when all the birds were singing,
then did I reveal to her
my yearning and longing.
-Heinrich Heine
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Self Respect
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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.
-Heinrich Heine
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Simplicity
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Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, He will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees.
What Heine expresses as a kind of joke is, according to Freud, a deep psychological truth: along with the innate human drive for pleasure there is also an equally innate drive to inflict pain upon others. This impulse estranges people from one another and renders them decidedly antisocial.~ Lee Hardy, The Fabric of this World
-Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Einfalle, Section I, as quoted in Freud, Civilization, p. 64n
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Sin
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God will forgive me. It's his job.
-Heinrich Heine, attributed at his last words: Bien s
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Sleep
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Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.
-Heinrich Heine
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Books by and about Heinrich Heine