Teutonic Quotes

The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to. ~ Helmut Newton

But how? How can you just get over these things, darling? ... You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?'
'I choose to ... I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.'
'But it's not that easy.'
He smiled that Frank smile. 'Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things ... I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No' - his voice became sober- 'we always have a choice. All of us.' p.323 ~ M.L. Stedman

The association of the wild and the wood also run deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the root word wald and the old Teutonic word walthus, meaning 'forest.' Walthus entered Old English in its variant forms of 'weald,' 'wald,' and 'wold,' which were used to designate both 'a wild place' and 'a wooded place,' in which wild creatures -- wolves, foxes, bears -- survived. The wild and wood also graft together in the Latin word silva, which means 'forest,' and from which emerged the idea of 'savage,' with its connotations of fertility.... ~ Robert Macfarlane

The Prince's name preserved, in the boldness with which its opening syllables were - to borrow an expression from music - attacked, and in the stammering repetition that scanned them, the energy, the mannered simplicity, the heavy refinements of the Teutonic race, projected like green boughs over the "Heim" of dark blue enamel which glowed with the mystic light of Rhenish window behind the pale and finely wrought gildings of the German eighteenth century. This name included, among the several names of which it was composed, that of a little German watering-place to which as a small child I had gone with my grandmother, under a mountain honoured by the feet of Goethe, from the vineyards of which we used to drink at the Kurhof the illustrious vintages with their compound and sonorous names like the epithets which Homer applies to his heroes. And so, scarcely had I heard it spoken than, before I had recalled the watering-place, the Prince's name seemed to shrink, to become imbued with humanity, to find large enough for itself a little place in my memory to which it clung, familiar, earthbound, picturesque, appetizing, light, with something about it that was authorized, prescribed. ~ Marcel Proust

Eric, my German hairdresser, was waiting for me in the large dressing room upstairs. He'd cut my auburn hair since I was six and had seen it through tragic self-trimmings of my bangs, unfortunate summers of excessive Sun-In use, and horrible home perms gone terribly wrong. He'd never shrunk from haughtily chastising me through my follicular antics and had thrown in plenty of Teutonic life coaching along the way, on every subject from pimply high school boys to current events and politics. And he'd pretty much made me feel equal parts stupid and uncultured on more than one occasion with his superior knowledge of theater and art and opera.
But I loved him. He was important to me. So when I asked him to come to my wedding to transform my hair into an elegant and sexy and uncontrived but polished updo, Eric had answered, simply, "Yes."
And the moment I sat down in the chair, he chastised me for washing my hair right before I arrived.
"Ees juss too smooz," Eric scolded.
"I'm sorry," I begged. "Please don't ground me, Eric. I didn't want my head to stink on my wedding night."
And for the first time ever, I saw Eric crack a relaxed, mellow smile.
I loved it that Eric was there. ~ Ree Drummond

The secular power, on the contrary, was in the hands of kings and barons of Teutonic descent, who endeavoured to preserve what they could of the institutions that they had brought out of the forests of Germany. Absolute power was alien to those institutions, and so was what appeared to these vigorous conquerors as a dull and spiritless legality. The king had to share his power with the feudal aristocracy, ~ Bertrand Russell

If I have a foreign accent - which I much regret - it is cosmopolitan, but not Teutonic. I am a daughter of the great Jewish race, and my somewhat uncultivated language is the outcome of our enforced wanderings. ~ Sarah Bernhardt

I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

If the union between England and America is a powerful factor in the cause of peace, a new Triple Alliance between the Teutonic race and the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race will be a still more potent influence in the future of the world. ~ Edward Grey

There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy. ~ Lin Yutang

In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet - a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles - let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word "mother" and the word "kaiser" was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about - and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

National Socialism adapts Fascism, Bolshevism, Americanism, works it all into Teutonic Romanticism. ~ Victor Klemperer

Shakespeare's plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles. ~ Bjornstjerne Bjornson

Teutonic migration ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I got a servant, a nice clean German girl from the Volga. Her village had been devastated - no other word can convey my meaning - by the liquidation of the Kulaks. In the German Volga Republic the peasants, who had been settled there two hundred years before to set an example to the Russians, had been better farmers and so enjoyed a higher standard of life than most peasants in Russia. Consequently, the greater part of them were classified as Kulaks and liquidated.
***
The girls came to the towns to work as servants, and were highly prized, since they were more competent, cleaner, more honest and self-respecting than the Russian peasants. Curiously, they were the most purely Teutonic Germans I had ever seen, Germans like the pictures in Hans Andersen fairy tales, blue-eyed, with long golden plaits and lovely, fair skins. Being Protestants, and regarding the Russians around them as no better than barbarians, they had intermarried little and retained a racial purity which would no doubt have delighted Hitler.
***
My Hilda seemed a treasure. She could cook, she could read and write, she kept herself and the rooms clean and looked like a pink and flaxen doll. I could treat her as an equal without finding that this led to her stealing my clothes and doing no work.
The servant problem in Moscow for Jane and me lay in our inability to bully and curse and drive, which was the only treatment the Russian servant understood. It was quite natural that this should ~ Freda Utley

He smiled that Frank smile. "Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things." He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow. "I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No" - his voice became sober - "we always have a choice. All of us. ~ M.L. Stedman

When it got to be time to design the week - a period of time, unlike the day, month, and year, with no intrinsic astronomical significance - it was assigned seven days, each named after one of the seven anomalous lights in the night sky. We can readily make out the remnants of this convention. In English, Saturday is Saturn's day. Sunday and Mo[o]nday are clear enough. Tuesday through Friday are named after the gods of the Saxon and kindred Teutonic invaders of Celtic/Roman Britain: Wednesday, for example, is Odin's (or Wodin's) day, which would be more apparent if we pronounced it as it's spelled, "Wedn's Day"; Thursday is Thor's day; Friday is the day of Freya, goddess of love. The last day of the week stayed Roman, the rest of it became German. ~ Carl Sagan

and we may feel sure that, like all their Teutonic kindred, they worshipped Wodan, the spirit of wind and storm, the inspirer of poetry and wisdom. ~ Henry Bradley

The East German manages to combine a Teutonic capacity for bureauracy with a Russian capacity for infinite delay ~ Goronwy Rees

But I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit; we do not look upon life as a time for enjoyment, but as a time for action and exertion. Our glory and our beauty arise out of our inward strength, which makes us victorious over material resistance, and over greater difficulties still. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I care not whether the soldiers are of Milesian, Teutonic, African or Angelo-Saxon descent. I despise the principle that make a difference between them in the hour of battle and of death. ~ Thaddeus Stevens

Ethnically, the Germans are Teutonic ... being made up of Vandals, Gepidae, and Goths, all of whom emigrated - south from Sweden in about 500 BC; why they emigrated is not exactly clear, but many scholars believe it was because they saw the way Sweden was going, i.e. neutral. ~ Alan Coren

What I'm talking about here, by the way, is salvation. The latin root, salve, means 'health.' The Teutonic cognates 'health' and 'holy' share the same root. Being agnostic about the afterlife, I look for salvation here - not to be saved from life, but to be saved by life, in life, for life. ~ Forrest Church