Lion Feuchtwanger > Quotes

“In itself it is nothing. Nothing but a book: parchment, colouring, ink. Yet the most perishable material is at the same time the most durable substance in the world…”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Jew of Rome

“There is nothing the rabble fears more than intelligence. If they understood what is truly terrifying, they would fear ignorance.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns

“The word and the image mutually excluded each other. Joseph was a literary man to his very marrow; he put faith in the invisible Word; it was the most miraculous thing in all the world; though without form it had more power than anything endowed with form”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, Josephus

“What history had taught him was Amazement. A tremendous amazement that each time those in jeopardy had been so slow in thinking about their safety.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns

“Speranța este un sfetnic prost.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, Vulpile în vie I

“It was not living, it was vegetation. We longed for death.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Can you remember, Acte...how much easier our belief in Nero made life for us in the old days? And can you remember the paralysis, the numbness that seized the whole world when Nero died? Didn't you feel as if the world had grown bare and colorless all of a sudden? Those people on the Palatine have tried to steal our Nero from us, from you and me. Isn't splendid to think that we can show them they haven't succeeded? They have smashed his statues into splinters, erased his name from all the inscriptions, they even replaced his head on that huge statue in Rome with the peasant head of old Vespasian. Isn't it fine to teach them that all that hasn't been of the slightest use? Granted that they have been successful for a few years. For a few years they have actually managed to banish all imagination from the world, all enthusiasm, extravagance, everything that makes life worth living. But now, with our Nero, all these things are back again.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The False Nero

“Vor ihm erhob sich die Feldherrnhalle, eine Nachbildung der Florentiner Loggia dei Lanzi, errichtet den beiden größten bayrischen Feldherrn, Tilly und Wrede, von denen der eine kein Bayer und der andere kein Feldherr war.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, Success: Three Years in the Life of a Province

“But one should not trust first impulses. Instinct is not always a safe counsellor by any means.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Talented person is talented everywhere.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger

“I am always thinking of that remark of Theodor Lessing, which I quoted earlier in this book, that history is “the art of giving meaning to the meaningless.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“It has always been a blessed experience with me after an illness to feel that I was recovering.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“I am a slow worker, but I could have written at least two books more in the time that I have been obliged to spend waiting around public offices and in the back yards of recruiting stations—waiting unnecessarily for unnecessary things.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“sort. The authority of sober reason is being undermined. The paltry varnish of logic is being scraped away. An epoch is at hand during which the large, partially hyperdeveloped animal, known as man, will revert to his fundamentals. Aren’t you thrilled to be living during these times?” Quietly, he turned his”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns

“The years that had passed had displayed vividly before our eyes the fickleness of human attitudes.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“There were of course exceptions, but on the whole the “intellectuals” among us withstood the hardships of the journey resignedly and patiently. They proved to be tougher, quieter, more uncomplaining than many men from other walks of life who were physically stronger and physically better trained.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“while America, for its part, proved singularly unreceptive to the socialist-realist principle that undergirds them all: the principle that art can, or even must, have a message; and that such art-with-a-message, which will always be dismissed as propaganda, is in fact the only available corrective to the real and actual propaganda of entrenched official power.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns

“Die Mode jener Jahre war umständlich und töricht. Die Männer knöpften sich steifleinerne Krägen um die Hälse, enge, überflüssige, unschöne Kleidungsstücke, und umwanden sie mühsam zu schlingenden, zwecklosen Binden, sogenannten Krawatten.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, Success: Three Years in the Life of a Province

“However small we made ourselves, we took space and air from our neighbours. We were a torment to one another.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“my delight in philology, my insistence on having language clear-cut and exact, impels me, when someone says it is cold and someone else that it is warm, to look at the thermometer and say: “Gentlemen, it is 69 degrees Fahrenheit in this room.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“I have sincerely tried not to deride the action of men, not to lament nor to abhor them. I have done all in my might to understand them.- Spinoza”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, Jephtha and his Daughter

“Glauben Sie ernstlich'[...]'daß wir dieses Volk nicht wieder werden zu Menschen machen können?”
― Lion Feuchtwanger

“There was no question but that the Nationalists had carried out their program point by point, that program at whose primitive barbarism people had so often smiled.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns

“Had I not been thinking always of the ludicrous aspects of my own plight, or of the plight of others, I could not have survived that depressing, degrading experience without spiritual harm.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“There I had been for three-quarters of a year caught in that mousetrap of a France, unable to get permission to leave the country. Now, for a second time, I was to taste the pleasures of an internment camp.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“The French not only refused any co-operation from us German anti-Fascists, they locked us up.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Both of us had long since learned to take the stupidity and indolence of men for granted and as things of which it was superfluous to speak.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“It is no less astonishing how many subjects—historical, philological, biological, sociological, economic—people regard as politics”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“The city of Nîmes itself was short of everything; it was swamped with refugees from Holland, Belgium, and northern France. It had tripled in population.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“He would point to some spot or other near the latrines. “There,” he would say, pushing a bit of bread about inside his mouth, “on the sixth of February at five o’clock in the afternoon I began my memorable discussion with Professor K. on the ramifications of Leibniz’s doctrine of monads in the thought of our day.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940