Frases de Heinrich Heine

página 2

“Hablar de locura de amor es un pleonasmo; el amor en sí ya es locura.”

“Si quieres viajar hacia las estrellas, no busques compañía.”

“Allí donde se queman los libros, se acaba por quemar a los hombres.”

“Bien mirados, todos nos ocultamos, completamente desnudos, en los vestidos que usamos.”

“Los sabios emiten ideas nuevas; los necios las expanden.”

“En las épocas oscuras, las personas se guían mejor por la religión, al igual que en una noche completamente oscura un ciego es el mejor guía; conoce las carreteras y caminos mejor que un hombre que puede ver. Sin embargo, cuando llega la luz del día, es una tontería usar hombres ciegos y viejos como guías.”

“Donde se quiere a los libros también se quiere a los hombres.”

“Chopin es un gran poeta de la música, un artista tan genial que sólo puede compararse con Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini y Berlioz.”

“El que piensa en la muerte está ya muerto a medias.”

“Los conceptos filosóficos alimentados en el silencio del estudio de un académico pueden destruir toda una civilización.”

“Construye tu cabaña en el valle, pero nunca lo hagas en la cima.”

“Dios me perdonará: es su oficio.”

“Dios nos ha dado la lengua para que podamos decir cosas amables a nuestros amigos y duras verdades a nuestros enemigos.”

“Es una antigua historia que resulta siempre nueva.”

“No hay nada más silencioso que un cañón cargado.”

“Sencillamente, le debo mi esclarecimiento a la lectura de un libro…. ¿Un libro? Sí, y es un libro antiguo y sencillo, modesto como la naturaleza misma, y tan natural; un libro que parece tan eficaz y sin pretensiones como el Sol que nos calienta, como el pan que nos nutre; un libro que nos mira tan triste y afectuosamente como una vieja abuela, que leyera ella misma diariamente el libro, con labios amorosos y trémulos, y con los anteojos sobre la nariz…. Y, muy sin ceremonia, el nombre de este libro es el libro, la Biblia.” - Fuente: La Atalaya 1 de octubre de 1977.”

“Todavía no se ha descubierto la brújula para navegar en la alta mar del matrimonio.”

“Todo delito que no se convierte en escándalo no existe para la sociedad.”

“En los ojos del espantoso intérprete brillaba un ansia de destrucción tan burlona, y sus delgados labios se movían de modo tan lúgubremente agitado, que parecía como si murmurara antiquísimas y malvadas palabras mágicas para conjurar la tempestad y desencadenar los espíritus malignos que yacen atrapados en las profundidades abismales del mar.”

“Por lo general, está loco, pero tiene momentos lúcidos en los que solo es estúpido.”

“I cannot explain the sadness
That's fallen on my breast.
An old, old fable haunts me,
And will not let me rest.”

“Christianity is an idea, and as such is indestructible and immortal, like every idea.”

“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.”

“The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.”

“People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.”

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

“Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.”

“The whole system of symbolism impressed on the art and the life of the Middle Ages must awaken the admiration of poets in all times. In reality, what colossal unity there is in Christian art, especially in its architecture! These Gothic cathedrals, how harmoniously they accord with the worship of which they are the temples, and how the idea of the Church reveals itself in them! Everything about them strives upwards, everything transubstantiates itself; the stone buds forth into branches and foliage, and becomes a tree; the fruit of the vine and the ears of corn become blood and flesh; the man becomes God; God becomes a pure spirit. For the poet, the Christian life of the Middle Ages is a precious and inexhaustibly fruitful field. Only through Christianity could the circumstances of life combine to form such striking contrasts, such motley sorrow, such weird beauty, that one almost fancies such things can never have had any real existence, and that it is all a vast fever-dream the fever-dream of a delirious deity. Even Nature, during this sublime epoch of the Christian religion, seemed to have put on a fantastic disguise; for oftentimes though man, absorbed in abstract subtilties, turned away from her with abhorrence, she would recall him to her with a voice so mysteriously sweet, so terrible in its tenderness, so powerfully enchanting, that unconsciously he would listen and smile, and become terrified, and even fall sick unto death.”

“Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.”

“Out of my own great woe
I make my little songs.”

“Don't send a poet to London.”

“You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.”

“Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.”

“Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.”

“Oaks shall be rent; the Word shall shatter —
Yea, on that fiery day, the Crown,
Even the palace walls shall totter,
And domes and spires come crashing down.”

“Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”

“So we keep asking, over and over,
Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths —
But is that an answer?”

“Hence the one-sided errors—ces erreurs d'idée fixe—which we cannot escape when we stand too near to one or the other party; either deceives, yet does it unaware, and we confide most willingly in those who think as we do. But if we are by chance of such indifferent nature that we, without special predilection, keep in continual intercourse with all, then we are bewildered by the perfect self-confidence of either party, and our judgement is neutralised in the most depressing manner.”

“Although the Protestant Church is accused of much disastrous bigotry, one claim to immortal fame must be granted it: by permitting freedom of inquiry in the Christian faith and by liberating the minds of men from the yoke of authority, it enabled freedom of inquiry in general to take root in Germany, and made it possible for science to develop independently. German philosophy, though it now puts itself on an equal basis with the Protestant Church or even above it, is nonetheless only its daughter; as such it always owes the mother a forbearing reverence.”

“I am speaking of the religion whose earliest dogmas contain a condemnation of the flesh, and which not merely grants the spirit superiority over the flesh but also deliberately mortifies the flesh in order to glorify the spirit. I am speaking of the religion whose unnatural mission actually introduced sin and hypocrisy into the world, since just because of the condemnation of the flesh the most innocent pleasures of the senses became a sin and just because of the impossibility of our being wholly spirit hypocrisy inevitably developed.”

“The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough.”

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

“Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle.”

“I had once a beautiful fatherland.
The oak tree
Grew so high there, violets nodded softly.
It was a dream.It kissed me in German and spoke in German
(You would hardly believe
How good it sounded) the words: "I love you!"
It was a dream.”

“What! Think you that my flashes show me
Only in lightnings to excel?
Believe me, friends, you do not know me,
For I can thunder quite as well.”

“Money bequeathed to my wife "on the express condition that she remarry. I want at least one person to be truly bereaved by my death."”

“Rossini, divine master.”

“Splendid if I overcome
My earthy passion,
But if I succeed not,
Still I have known happiness!”

“He who will establish himself on a certain height must yield according to circumstances, like the weather-cock on a church-spire, which, though it be made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it remained obstinately immovable, and did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind. But a great man will never so far contradict his own feelings as to see, or, it may be, increase, with cold-blooded indifference, the misfortunes of his fellow country-men.”