Heinrich Heine Quotes

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

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.

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

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.

Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.

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

Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.

He only profits from praise who values criticism.

I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.

Woman is at once apple and serpent.

Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death.

It is a common phenomenon that just the prettiest girls find it so difficult to get a man.

God will forgive me. It's his job.

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

Whether a revolution succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.

The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

Oh, what lies there are in kisses.

The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it ... did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

The beauteous eyes of the spring's fair night With comfort are downward gazing.

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

When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on.

The spring's already at the gate With looks my care beguiling; The country round appeareth straight A flower-garden smiling.

In these times we fight for ideas and newspapers are our fortress.

Whenever books are burned, men also in the end are burned.

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all.

It is extremely difficult for a Jew to be converted, for how can he bring himself to believe in the divinity of - another Jew?

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

While we are indifferent to our good qualities, we keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we come to look on them as virtues.