Heinrich Heine Quotes - Page 8

What Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle.

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.

Reform Judaism is like mock turtle soup-turtle soup without the turtle

A blaspheming Frenchman is a spectacle more pleasing to the Lord than a praying Englishman.

Immortality—dazzling idea! who first imagined thee! Was it some jolly burgher of Nuremburg, who with night-cap on his head, and white clay pipe in mouth, sat on some pleasant summer evening before his door, and reflected in all his comfort, that it would be right pleasant, if, with unextinguishable pipe, and endless breath, he could thus vegetate onwards for a blessed eternity? Or was it a lover, who in the arms of his loved one, thought the immortality-thought, and that because he could think and feel naught beside!—Love! Immortality!

From every Englishman emanates a kind of gas, the deadly choke-damp of boredom.

The air grows cool and darkles, The Rhine flows calmly on; The mountain summit sparkles In the light of the setting sun.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

Glow-worms on the ground are moving, As if in the torch-dance circling.

Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.

She resembles the Venus de Milo: she is very old, has no teeth, and has white spots on her yellow skin.

Oh, what lies there are in kisses.

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.

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

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.

The swan in the pool is singing, And up and down doth he steer, And, singing gently ever, Dips under the water clear.

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!

But oh! the Latin!-Madame, you can really have no idea of what a mess it is. The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. Lucky dogs! they already knew in their cradles the nouns ending in im. I on the contrary had to learn it by heart, in the sweat of my brow.

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.

The lotus flower is troubled At the sun's resplendent light; With sunken head and sadly She dreamily waits for the night.

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.

Every woman is the gift of a world to me.

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.

He who fights with priests may make up his mind to have his poor good name torn and befouled by the most infamous lies and the most cutting slanders.