#German Quotes

“Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven.”

“Life is too short to learn German”

“It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.”

“My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.”

“It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.”

“It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.”

“It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.”

“A German joke is no laughing matter.”

“There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.”

“How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand!”

“In German, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”

“...the circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.”

“There is plenty of Hühnerfleisch in the Kühlschrank. (There is plenty of chicken in the fridge).”

“How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, how much beer is there in the German intelligence.”

“One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.”