Jean Paul
Jean Paul
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth21 March 1763
CountryGermany
thinking example rumination
It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.
possibility advantage can-do
All I can do is make the best of what I am, become accustomed to it, evaluate the possibilities, and take advantage of them the best I can.
philosophy doe helping
Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.
writing thinking long
I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.
writing past men
Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.
responsibility men liberty
We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
god hands saws
I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands....I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed....He never looked at me again....I had the more difficulty getting rid of Him the Holy Ghost in that He had installed Himself at the back of my head....I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw Him out.
book men mirrors
All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.
men literature world
The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.
nature eye escaping
I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.
struggle men essence
In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.
evil be-good values
To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.
children animal too-much
When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.
night done daytime
What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.