Heinrich Heine Quotes

I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.

Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood.

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!

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

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.

Man,--the aristocrat amongst the animals.

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.

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

In the image of the lion made He kittens small and curious.

Human misery is too great for men to die without faith.

The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.

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

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling...

No compass has ever been invented for the high seas of matrimony.

True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.

Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.

That was only the beginning - where one burns books, one will finally also burn people.

All I really want is enough to live on, a little house in the country... and a tree in the garden with seven of my enemies hanging in it.

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!

Genius: 1. to believe your own thought. To believe that what is true for you is ultimately true. 2. a sledgehammer. 3. the fruit of labour and thought. 4. soul. 5. the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. 6. something one can become.

If one has no heart, one cannot write for the masses.

Out of my great sorrows, I make little songs.

There are more fools in the world than there are people.

The propaganda of communism possesses a language which every people can understand. Its elements are simply hunger, envy, death.

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.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle. For it stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter.

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.

Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature's grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.

Silence is the essential condition of happiness.

Matrimony; the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented.

I bequeath all my property to my wife on the condition that she remarry immediately. Then there will be at least one man to regret my death.

Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions.

Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.

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

God will forgive me the foolish remarks I have made about Him just as I will forgive my opponents the foolish things they have written about me, even though they are spiritually as inferior to me as I to thee, O God!

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?

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

The sun's sweet ray is hovering discovered.

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.

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

Write . . . write . . . pencil . . . paper.

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.

Oh, they loved dearly: their souls kissed, they kissed with their eyes, they were both but one single kiss.

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.

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

He is noble who both feels and acts nobly.

A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.