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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Talented person is talented everywhere.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger

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

“What is the use of being a writer of some note if one cannot treat oneself to such a luxury?”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Хората не винаги вярваха на истината, а онова на което вярваха, не винаги бе истина.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, Erzählungen

“For a moment, he seemed to be falling into an abyss, on the verge of an unprecedented inner collapse. All his life he had been persuaded that what a man appeared to be was more important than what he was. This was the principle, on which he had based his whole existence, both his outward career and his secret thoughts. It was not what one admitted to oneself that mattered, but what one expressed in public; not the money one actually possessed, but the money one spent when others were there to see one spend it. The ideals a man carried in his hearth were of no account compared with those he acknowledged to the world. That had been Pierre´s credo.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, Foxes in a Vineyard

“I myself had been received by the President of the Republic. Leaflets dropped by English flyers over Germany had quoted sentences of mine. I had written books whose background portrayed the barbaric ways of the Nazis, and they had been read by millions. The Nazis had denounced me as Enemy Number One in not a few of their manifestos. To intern so many people who had beyond any doubt proved themselves bitter enemies of the Nazis was a stupid, revolting farce.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“For a large part of what I know about people and things I have to thank an art of listening which wise teachers taught me early.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Why should the Nazis do anything to me? Just because I have a little lingerie shop in Nice and my name is Gustav Kohn? What interest can Hitler possibly have in me? Don’t you think I ought to stay?”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940