Heinrich Heine Quotes

At noon I feel as though I could devour all the elephants of Hindostan, and then pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg cathedral; in the evening I become so sentimental that I would fain drink up the Milky Way without reflecting how indigestible I should find the little fixed stars, and by night there is the Devil himself broke loose in my head and no mistake.

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.

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

Oh, what lies there are in kisses.

Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too

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

The years keep coming and going, Men will arise & depart; Only one thing is immortal: The love that is in my heart.

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

Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman [the cross] is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then ... a play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.

There is one thing on earth more terrible than English music, and that is English painting.

Experience is a good school. But the fees are high

Thought precedes action as lighting does thunder.

It is a common phenomenon that just the prettiest girls find it so difficult to get a man.

I call'd the devil, and he came, And with wonder his form did I closely scan; He is not ugly, and is not lame, But really a handsome and charming man. A man in the prime of life is the devil, Obliging, a man of the world, and civil; A diplomatist too, well skill'd in debate, He talks quite glibly of church and state.

Newness hath an evanescent beauty.

A lonely fir-tree is standing On a northern barren height; It sleeps, and the ice and snow-drift Cast round it a garment of white.

The cloudlets are lazily sailing O'er the blue Atlantic sea; And mid the twilight there hovers A shadowy figure o'er me ...

And yonder sits a maiden, The fairest of the fair, With gold in her garment glittering, And she combs her golden hair.

Every age thinks its battle the most important of all.

Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain; - These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull ...

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

Still is the night, it quiets the streets down,
In that window my love would appear;
She's long since gone away from this town,
But this house where she lived still remains here.
A man stands here too, staring up into space,
And wrings his hands with the strength of his pain:
It chills me, when I behold his pale face
For the moon shows me my own features again!
You spirit double, you specter with my face
Why do you mock my love-pain so
That tortured me here, here in this place
So many nights, so long ago?

I do not know the meaning of my sadness; there is an old fairy tale that I cannot get out of my mind.

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.

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.

God has given us speech in order that we may say pleasant things to our friends, and tell bitter truths to our enemies.

I have sown Dragon's teeth and reaped only fleas.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.

I live, which is the main point.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

A brainiac notices everything, an ignoramus comments about everything.

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.

Known for his prose as for his poetry. The subsequent fame of his verse is due in part to the many composers who set poems, especially those in the Book of Songs, to music. Hence his early, lyrical verse became known at the expense of his later, predominantly satirical verse, and his verse has in turn overshadowed his prose. Yet Heine's prose is as rich in humour, satire, wit, lyricism, and

With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.

The German Censors - - - - - - - - - -
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The fountain of love is the rose and the lily, the sun and the dove.

The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.

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.

As the stars are the glory of the sky, so great men are the glory of their country, yea, of the whole earth. The hearts of great men are the stars of earth; and doubtless when one looks down from above upon our planet, these hearts are seen to send forth, a silvery light just like the stars of heaven.

First, I thought, almost despairing,
This must crush my spirit now;
Yet I bore it, and am bearing-
Only do not ask me how.

Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on Christ.

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.

When the leeches have sucked enough blood, one simply has to sprinkle some salt on their backs and they fall off – But you, my friend, how can I get rid of you?
Your despairing cousin

Every age has its problem, by solving which humanity is helped forward.

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

The Blossoms and leaves in plenty From the apple tree fall each day; The merry breezes approach them, And with them merrily play.

I care little in the existence of a heaven or hell; self respect does not allow me to guide my acts with an eye toward heavenly salvation or hellish punishment. I pursue the good in life because it is beautiful and attracts me; and shun the bad because it is ugly and repulsive. All our acts should originate from the spring of unselfish love, whether there be a continuation after death or not.

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.

The foolish race of mankind are swarming below in the night; they shriek and rage and quarrel - and all of them are right.

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

The beauteous eyes of the spring's fair night With comfort are downward gazing.

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.

I am no longer a divine biped. I am no longer the freest German after Goethe, as Ruge named me in healthier days. I am no longer the great hero No. 2, who was compared with the grape-crowned Dionysius, whilst my colleague No. 1 enjoyed the title of a Grand Ducal Weimarian Jupiter. I am no longer a joyous, somewhat corpulent Hellenist, laughing cheerfully down upon the melancholy Nazarenes. I am now a poor fatally-ill Jew, an emaciated picture of woe, an unhappy man.

God will pardon me. It is His trade.

Everywhere that a great soul gives utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha.

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.

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

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.

Tell me who first did kisses suggest? It was a mouth all glowing and blest; It kissed and it thought of nothing beside. The fair month of May was then in its pride, The flowers were all from the earth fast springing, The sun was laughing, the birds were singing.

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

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 ...

Sweet May lies fresh before us, To life the young flowers leap, And through the Heaven's blue o'er us The rosy cloudlets sweep.

Out of my own great woe I make my little songs.

Ask me not what I have, but what I am.

And over the pond are sailing Two swans all white as snow; Sweet voices mysteriously wailing Pierce through me as onward they go. They sail along, and a ringing Sweet melody rises on high; And when the swans begin singing, They presently must die.

The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at the poor African; for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him.

The same fact that Boccaccio offers in support of religion might be adduced in behalf of a republic: It exists in spite of its ministers.

The sea appears all golden. Beneath the sun-lit sky.

Thought is invisible nature.

Whenever books are burned, men also in the end are burned.

For the Greeks, beauty is truth; for the Hebrews, truth is beauty.

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

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

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. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies
but not before they have been hanged.

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

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.

At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it - but I did I bear it. The question remains: how?

Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.

I live! Red life boils in my veins, earth yields beneath my feet, in the glow of love I embrace trees and statues, and they live in my embrace. Every woman is to me the gift of a world. I revel in the melody of her countenance, and with a single glance of my eye I can enjoy more than others with their every limb through all their lives.

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.

The butterfly long loved the beautiful rose, And flirted around all day; While round him in turn with her golden caress, Soft fluttered the sun's warm ray ... I know not with whom the rose was in love, But I know that I loved them all. The butterfly, rose, and the sun's bright ray, The star and the bird's sweet call.

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.

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

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

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.

He only profits from praise who values criticism.

Pretty women without religion are like flowers without perfume.

Phychical pain is more easily borne than physical; and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former.

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.

In blissful dream, in silent night, There came to me, with magic might, With magic might, my own sweet love, Into my little room above.

Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.

The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.

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.

Like a great poet, nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love.

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.

When words leave off, music begins.