The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Winged Words A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

Not a dry eye in the house

These colloquially often used words come from the poem Paul. A hand drawing by the theologian and writer Johannes Daniel Falk. It can mean that everyone laughs until tears come, or that everyone is moved and cries.

The line follows the verses:

There he goes and sings no more!

The quotation comes from the second edition of the song play Die Kunst, geliebt zu werden by the singing pedagogue Ferdinand Gumbert, published in 1866.

It is used as a joking comment when someone dejectedly leaves or resigns from his post after a failure. For example, an article about the surprising resignation of the Belgian TV manager Guillaume de Posch at ProSiebenSat.1 Media is headed with the following words:

That's where it all ends!

This common expression meaning "That's outrageous!" comes from the farce by the comedy poet Louis Angely's Die Reise auf gemeinschaftliche Kosten - Komisches Gemälde in fünf Aufgen, which was largely localised in Berlin after French comedy plays. In the first scene of the second act, it reads:

The writer Paul Heyse wrote about this play in his memoirs of his youth:

There the coral laughs

This expression goes back to a 1930s illustrated magazine called Koralle from the Ullstein publishing house, whose joke page bore the headline "Da lacht die Koralle".

This headline was also used by the news magazine Der Spiegel in 1972 for an article about the comic paper Zack, which was published by the Axel Springer Group in its subsidiary, Koralle-Verlag.

There lies the dog buried

This saying goes back to a 17th century inscription on a monument in the Thuringian village of Winterstein (Waltershausen):

The faithful dog Stutzel went all alone with letters on his collar to Friedenstein to the castle of the sovereign and rendered many services through his loyalty. When he died, his mistress had him put in a coffin, and together with her servants she buried him solemnly. It is said that she even forced the dog to be buried in the cemetery, but the priest and the congregation had him dug up again and buried in the present place. This gave rise to the following proverb in the village:

Where the dog is buried lies the core of a matter. It is possible, however, that this idiom has nothing to do with the pet, but with the Middle High German word hunde, which means prey, treasure. It then means: That's where the treasure is buried.

Robert Burns' song Whistle O'er The Lave O't with the beginning "First when Maggy was my care" became Da liegt der Hund begraben in Adolf von Winterfeld's translation:

The phrase "here the dead dog is buried" is also pejorative for a barren inhospitable area.

Here I stand, poor fool! And am as wise as before

At the beginning of Goethe's Faust I, Faust speaks these words after referring to all his previous studies, which he considers useless:

The quote is invoked again and again when someone feels overwhelmed, as for example in this article about the diversity of mobile technologies:

But it's terrible down there

This quote comes from Friedrich Schiller's ballad The Diver, in which the diver speaks these words after successfully diving into the depths for the king's cup:

People usually use the quotation jokingly, for example when they want to express their disgust at a dark cellar or a deep cave.

Friedrich Engels wrote of a visit to an emigrant ship in his 1841 travelogue A Trip to Bremerhaven:

You know what you've got ... Good evening!

This advertising slogan, formulated by Werner Butter, was used by Volkswagen from 1969, initially for the VW Beetle and as late as the 1990s as a claim for the company.

From 1973, the Henkel Group also used it for its detergent brand Persil.

The so-called Persil man, who presented his advertising message on television, serious as a daytime newsreader, in the manner of a news programme, was supposed to convey reliability. This was necessary because Persil's market share had declined as many housewives preferred to use cheaper detergents.

The wholesale company Engelkemper takes up this slogan on the subject of brand protection and explains:

You will be helped there!

In 1997, the entertainer Verona Pooth (then still Verona Feldbusch) advertised for the directory enquiries Telegate in a series of satirical TV commercials. All the spots ended with the insertion of the number 11-88-0 and Pooth's commentary:

The slogan, in which Pooth flirts with her lack of grammatical certainty in German, achieved cult status and was often modified. She also used it to help Telegate, a newcomer to the stock exchange, to a highly publicised first listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

There women become hyenas

This line of poetry comes from Friedrich Schiller's Lied von der Glocke. Schiller refers to the French Revolution at this point:

"Liberty and equality!", one hears resounding; The
quiet citizen takes up arms,
The streets fill, the halls,
And gangs of strangler march about."

The unleashed masses of people rage in the streets:

"Women become hyenas and joke with horror."

Being there is everything

"Taking part is everything" or "Taking part is more than winning" is always referred to as the Olympic thought, yet it is usually the common consolation for losers, because the official Olympic motto is Citius, altius, fortius - "Faster, Higher, Stronger".

That's how I recognise my Pappenheimer

"That's how I recognise my Pappenheimers" goes back to Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim, whose troops played a major role in the storming and sacking of Magdeburg in 1631. In the old empire, the Counts of Pappenheim from the Altmühltal were hereditary marshals responsible for the imperial coronation ceremonies.

This sentence is often quoted in the form "I know my Pappenheimer" and comes from Schiller's drama Wallenstein's Death. There it is not meant ironically at all. In the third act of the drama, when ten cuirassiers from Pappenheim want to find out whether Wallenstein wants to defect to the Swedes, a private says to him:

Wallenstein replies gratefully, "That's how I recognise my Pappenheimer."

Today, the term "Pappenheimer" is more associated with a tongue-in-cheek insight into inadequacies. The Süddeutsche Zeitung explains this change in meaning under the headline Auf diese Phrasen können Sie bauen:

So that was the crux of the matter

The saying comes from Goethe's drama Faust I (study room scene). During the Easter walk, Faust and Wagner are joined by a black poodle whose strange behaviour catches Faust's eye:

The poodle accompanies Faust to his study and transforms before his eyes:

Finally, the beast takes on human form, Mephisto emerges in the costume of a travelling scholar. This is followed by Faust's surprised exclamation:

The Other Sex

The Other Sex (French: Le deuxieme sexe; literally: The Second Sex) is the title of a famous book by Simone de Beauvoir, in which she deals with the demands and problems of women's emancipation. The title temporarily became the catchword of women's emancipation and is also used to refer to "the women" in general.

The basis of the scripture is the thesis:

The Munich philosophy professor Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann published a book on the 50th anniversary, which he gave the title Simone de Beauvoir and the Other Sex, and in it raises the provocative question: "Is emancipation failing?"

Combining the pleasant with the useful

This expression goes back to the poetry of the Roman poet Horace:

Horace speaks of poets and their works:

Today, the phrase is used quite generally in reference to pleasant things that also have a utilitarian aspect:

• "According to the motto 'combining the pleasant with the useful'".
• "Combine the pleasant with the useful!"
• "After retirement, you can combine the pleasant with the useful even more."

Someone other than me understands that

This quote comes from the opera Zar und Zimmermann by Albert Lortzing. The pompous mayor of Saardam van Bett has to learn that, among other things, he also suspected the Russian envoy of being a "traitor to the state":

van bed

(to Lefort)
"Answer me, who art thou? Speak!"

Lefort

van bed

The better is the enemy of the good

Also: "The better is the enemy of the good." The French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) popularised this Italian proverb. The proverb is used in two opposite meanings:

1. Something is only good until it is surpassed by something better, one should always strive for better.
2. One should be content with what is good and not always strive for better; the incessant striving for better makes one blind to what is good.

The little bit of household

Das bisschen Haushalt is a hit song sung by the actress Johanna von Koczian in 1977 that began with the following verses:

The song was very successful and ironically picked up on common clichés. Dieter Thomas Heck, the presenter of the ZDF Hit Parade, allowed himself the joke and swept the studio stairs during the song.

The song title is quoted again and again when it comes to the topic of the budget:

• "The Little Bit of Household" (exhibition at the Wels City Museum)
• "Eichel's number games: The little bit of budget." (Federal Budget of the German Finance Minister Hans Eichel)

The bread of the early years

The Bread of the Early Years is the title of a story by Heinrich Böll published in 1955. In the story, bread has become a symbol for the hero, who lived his youth with deprivation in the post-war period, and he judges his fellow human beings according to whether they are capable of sharing their bread with others.

Böll himself summarised the narrative with the following words:

The story was filmed in 1961 by director Herbert Vesely from a screenplay by Böll and Leo Ti.

The words Das Brot der frühen Jahre (The bread of the early years) are the title of an article about the young Jürgen Klinsmann, the son of a baker, in the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.

The critical bread of the early years is the headline over an article on the life of the art historian Carl Einstein.

This is the curse of the evil deed

The quote

That is the curse of the evil deed,

that it must always give birth to evil.

comes from Friedrich Schiller's tragedy The Piccolomini (V, 1).

Here Schiller paraphrases a quotation from Aeschylus' tragedy Agamemnon (V 757-758):

Τὸ δυσσεβὲς γὰρ ἔργον

μετὰ μὲν πλείονα τίκτει, σφετέρα δ' εἰκότα γέννᾳ.

To dyssebes gar ergon

meta men pleiona tiktei, sphetera d' eikota genna.

For the evil deed begets rampantly,

And produces a generation of evil deeds like the father.

The eternal

The quote is from Friedrich Schiller's tragedy Wallenstein's Death. In his soliloquy, Wallenstein hesitates to apostatise from the emperor because he realises:

In those days, the eternal past meant the habits to which people clung. Today, when someone is called a diehard, they are criticised for their stubborn adherence to what has survived.

The Eternal Feminine

This expression comes from Goethe's drama Faust II, and with it the Chorus mysticus concludes Faust's redemption with the words:

The designation "the eternal feminine" ties in with the immediately preceding invocation of the "Virgin, Mother, Queen and Goddess", by which the Virgin Mary is probably not meant ("Goddess"!), but the virgin mother of all nature and goddess with the mural crown, the birthing, nourishing and murdering Diana (Magna mater) of Ephesus, to whom Goethe felt particularly attached.

Ringelnatz parodies this line in his poem "Klimmzug".

The parody "The eternal feminine drags us down" is also common.

Let it be the whole of Germany

What is the German Fatherland? The text was written by Ernst Moritz Arndt before the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. In view of the French occupation of many German territories at the time, it has a strong anti-French slant, which can be explained by the fact that it was written during the wars of liberation.

"What is the German fatherland?
Is it Prussia? Is it Swabia?
Is it where the vine blossoms on the Rhine?
Is it where the seagull flies along the Belt?
Oh no, no, no!
|: His fatherland must be greater!:|"

On the occasion of the victory over Napoleon and the entry of Blücher's troops into Paris, the song was first performed in Berlin in 1814. As the melody did not find favour with the audience, the song failed to make an impact. Gustav Reichardt composed the new melody in 1825. Afterwards, the song was used by parts of the German population alongside the Deutschlandlied as a national song of the unification movement.

August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote a biting parody entitled "Wo ist Vetter Michels Vaterland?" after the failed German Revolution in 1849.

The dangerous age

This expression was popularised by a novel published in 1910 by the Danish author Karin Michaëlis entitled Den farlige alder, which, however, refers to a woman in menopause and describes her problems.

Melitta Walter writes about the author and her book:

Today, the dangerous age is jokingly used to describe the middle age of men, when they are more prone to love adventures. Männer im gefährlichen Alter is a German rogue comedy from 2004. The Hamburger Abendblatt headlines an article about Ildikó von Kürthy's novel Blaue Wunder with the following words:

It goes its socialist way

This saying was common in the GDR to express that something was proceeding according to plan and tended to be rather protracted. It refers to the inflationary use of the word socialist in formal language in the GDR ("the socialist national economy", "the developed socialist society", "our socialist homeland", "with a socialist greeting").

It is also the title of a song with which Wolf Biermann performed at his legendary Cologne concert on 13 November 1976. Three days after the concert, the East Berlin news agency Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst reported that Biermann had been stripped of his citizenship.

In his laudation of Biermann on the occasion of the award of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on his 70th birthday, the German Federal President Horst Köhler said on 15 November 2006:

The expression "socialist gait" is used when talking about encrusted structures in socialist states, such as:

• "Cuba in transition. Everything goes its socialist way" (The time of Fidel Castro seems to be over - much speaks for his brother Raúl as successor)

It only happens once, it never happens again

This is the refrain of a hit song from the film The Congress Dances, which was filmed in 1931. The first two and the last two lines of the refrain are the best known:

The song was sung by Lilian Harvey in the role of the young glove-maker Christel Weinzinger, who experienced a romance with the Russian Tsar Alexander I during the Congress of Vienna. Weinzinger promotes her business by throwing a bouquet of flowers with her business card into every carriage that passes. In doing so, she hits the Russian Tsar Alexander on the head. At first she is accused of an assassination attempt. The Tsar falls in love with Christel and uses the calling card to visit her in her shop. A romance develops and the Tsar has her picked up in a magnificent carriage.

In 2000, these lines became very famous once again, as Expo 2000 used a rock version of the song in their commercials.

Happiness is a light strumpet

This quotation is the first verse of the motto that precedes the second book of Heinrich Heine's cycle of poems Romanzero:

The topos of the impermanence of happiness appears here in the image of a prostitute; the topos of the persistence of unhappiness, on the other hand, in the image of the housewife or wife.

Listening to the grass grow

This expression refers to a superhuman sensitivity, but also to being able to perceive and know something better or earlier than others. The phrase supposedly goes back to an Old Norse doctrinal essay from the 13th century. The Younger Edda tells of the wise Heimdall, who was so perceptive that he could even hear the wool of the sheep and the grass grow. He could also see 100 roosts by day and night.

Heimdall was the guardian of the bridge Bifröst to Asgard. In case of danger he warned with the Gjallarhorn. He is also considered the ancestor of mankind.

The quotation collector Georg Büchmann quotes from the younger Edda in his Geflügelte Worte:

The Big Eat

Das große Fressen is the German title of the 1973 French feature film La Grande Bouffe, which caused a sensation because of its shocking depiction of a feeding frenzy. Four friends meet to commit collective suicide one weekend by overeating.

The film title soon became common as a name for events where the focus is on food, but also for economic affairs:

• "The big meal - protocol of an eating event".
• "Obesity in Britain - The Big Eat."
• "The big grub at the banks"

The biggest insect is the elephant

This absurd statement is one of the famous cathedrals of the pedagogue Johann Georg August Galletti.

Galletti was a grammar school professor in Gotha from 1783 to 1819. Friedrich Schiller is said to have declared him the "dullest and most witless historian who ever lived". He became famous for his slips of the tongue, which were allegedly collected by his students. The Ersch-Gruber encyclopaedia says of Galletti:

Fritz Eckhardt amended the quote as follows:

The good - this sentence stands firm - is always the evil that one leaves

This statement comes from the closing words to the picture story Die fromme Helene by Wilhelm Busch. With these words, Busch restores order. The website of Bayerischer Rundfunk states:

The shirt is closer to me than the skirt

This saying goes back to a comedy by the Roman poet Plautus, in whose play Trinummus (The Three Drachms Play) it is called that in Latin:

In German, the Roman lower garment, the tunic, is rendered as "shirt", while the Greek upper garment, pallium, which corresponds to the Roman toga, was translated as "skirt".

This saying means that one's own advantage is more important than the interests of others. It corresponds to the proverb:

The German Federal Minister for the Environment, Sigmar Gabriel, said in his Bundestag speech during the debate on the 2005 government declaration:

Gabriel continues with the image:

The heart has its reasons that the mind does not know

This aphorism comes from the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote in French:

The highest of feelings

These words come from the second act of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, in which Papageno and Papagena use them to express their anticipation of rich child blessings:

The highest happiness on earth

The alleged "Arabian proverb" often quoted by riders comes from the German poet Friedrich von Bodenstedt, who wrote the following in his "Songs of Mirza-Schaffy" in 1851:

Opponents of equestrianism have turned the saying around to the horses' benefit:

The Song of Songs

The Song of Solomon is a collection of popular love songs in the Old Testament. The German name goes back to Martin Luther. The Hebrew name Shir ha Shirim literally means "Song of Songs". The title in other languages also corresponds to this:

• Ἄσμα Ἀσμάτων (asma asmatôn) in the Greek Septuagint
• Canticum Canticorum in the Latin Vulgate
• Song of Songs (English)
• Cantique des cantiques (French)

Today, this title is used to denote something that is symbolically in praise of something:

• "Steve Ballmer sings the high song of security".
• "The high song of democracy"
• "The High Song of Hospitality"

Michael Preiner uses the expression high song of politics in his commentary on the election campaign for the US presidency:

The Empire Strikes Back

Das Imperium schlägt zurück (The Empire Strikes Back) is the German title of the 1980 US science fiction film The Empire Strikes Back, the fifth part of the Star Wars series. After the destruction of the Death Star, the rebels had to flee Yavin IV and look for a new base.

The film title is also referred to economic empires when they take countermeasures on any issue.

This is the misfortune of kings, that they do not hear the truth

These words were spoken by the politician Johann Jacoby in 1848 as a member of a delegation to the Prussian National Assembly to King Frederick William IV. The same idea can already be found in Johann Gottfried Herder's rewriting of the Spanish epic El Cid:

This is the beginning of a wonderful friendship

In the 1942 US film Casablanca, the bar owner Rick says to the French officer Louis Renault:

Shortly before, Rick has shot Major Strasser at the airport, who was trying to notify the control tower. Renault (although a witness to the crime) instructs the arriving police to arrest "the usual suspects" and thus sides with Rick.

This last sentence from the film is usually quoted jokingly or ironically, for instance when a relationship is looming that you wouldn't exactly call friendly.

That is the curse of our noble house: To strive in half ways and half deeds with half means hesitantly

That is the curse of our noble house:

Halfway and halfway to action.

To strive procrastinatingly with half means.

Yes or no, there is no middle ground here.

Franz Grillparzer, A Brotherly Dispute in Habsburg, Act 2

Mostly this quotation is shortened to Auf halben Wegen und zu halber Tat.

This is the epidemic of our time: madmen leading the blind.

is a saying from William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear (IV, 1); in the English original it says

This is the sun of Austerlitz!

As the sun rose on the Moskva on 7 September 1812, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte called out to his officers in French:

In doing so, he recalled the victorious Battle of the Three Emperors between Brno and Austerlitz of 2 December 1805, in which he had defeated the Austrian and Russian troops under Emperor Francis II and the Russian Tsar Alexander I. On the evening of 1 December, the cloudy overcast weather changed to a cloudless night. On 2 December, dense ground fog prevailed, which only gave way to the legendary sun of Austerlitz. The sun breaking through the clouds allowed an overview of the fighting, which contributed decisively to Napoléon's victory.

The Russians under Kutuzov engaged in battle in front of Moscow. Napoleon won the battle of Borodino, but it was one of the most costly conflicts of the Napoleonic wars.

Later, this exclamation was occasionally quoted with similar encouraging intent in the face of a difficult situation.

This is Lützow's wild, daring hunt

These words come from the song Lützows wilde Jagd, which Theodor Körner wrote in 1813 during the wars of liberation and whose six stanzas all end with this line. In the setting by Carl Maria von Weber, the song is still part of the repertoire of male choirs today. It begins with the following stanza:

The Freikorps of Baron Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow did particularly well in the wars of liberation. Lützow's Black Hunters owed their fame above all to their prominent members, such as the poet Theodor Körner, who fell in 1813. Other famous members were: the gymnast Karl Friedrich Friesen, the "gymnastics father" Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Joseph von Eichendorff, the most important poet of German Romanticism, and the later founder of kindergartens Friedrich Fröbel.

This is more than a crime, this is a mistake

When Napoleon Bonaparte executed the Duc d'Enghien, who had fought against the Republic, Talleyrand (or the Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché) said:

Napoléon had the Duke Enghien shot after a mock trial as an "emigrant paid by foreign countries to facilitate an invasion of France". The kidnapping and execution caused outrage throughout Europe, but was also a deterrent signal to Napoléon's opponents. This action damaged Napoléon's foreign policy. Napoleon had previously rejected a plea for clemency delivered by Joséphine de Beauharnais.

Domestically, however, Napoléon had stifled all royalist plots with this "terrorist execution" (Louis Bergeron) and had the approval of the broad population behind him. Significantly, in response to the outrage abroad, Napoléon himself only barely said:

In Talleyrand's words, one expresses that one considers an action to be imprudent.

Surely this cannot shake a sailor

These words are the reciprocal rhyme from a hit song sung in the 1939 film Paradise of the Bachelors with Heinz Rühmann. The lyrics are by Bruno Balz, the setting is by Michael Jary:

The film is about three hard-drinking men who live in a shared flat. The refrain is quoted as an expression of unwavering optimism.

No pig can read that

Marcus Swyn († 1585) was ducal bailiff of the northern third of Dithmarschen. After the end of the peasant republic in Dithmarschen, all property documents were to be certified by the bailiff. If the papers had become illegible, it was noted: "Not even a Swyn can read that. - Dat kann keen Swyn lesen."

However, there is also another interpretation. This is what the Deutschlandradio website says:

Calling a spade a spade

This saying has been around since the 17th century and became famous through Goethe's drama Faust I. Faust points out to his famulus Wagner that it can be dangerous to share one's insights openly:

The Child in the Man

This expression goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche's work Also sprach Zarathustra. In the chapter Von alten und jungen Weiblein (Of old and young women) we find the following statement:

Men often use the child in the man to justify their playfulness, while women use it to comment on male behaviour that seems childish to them.

The Lesser Evil

The expression goes back to the philosopher Plato, who has Socrates say in his dialogue Protagoras:

The art silk girl

The art-silk girl is the good-natured, ever-in-love and slightly dissolute stenographer Doris in the novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Art-Silk Girl) by the writer Irmgard Keun, published in 1932. Doris is somewhat reminiscent of artificial silk, of which she herself says:

Seeking the land of the Greeks with the soul

These words come from the opening monologue of Goethe's play Iphigenia on Tauris. Iphigenia laments her fate, far from her homeland:

This winged word was frequently quoted, especially in the 18th century, when interest was diverted from Roman to Greek antiquity.

The land where milk and honey flow

This image comes from the Old Testament, where God says to Moses with reference to the Israelites, for example:

"...and I came down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them out of this land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey."

(In total, this phrase is used 21 times in the Old Testament).

This expression is usually used jokingly to describe a place where everything is in abundance. It also serves as an antonym for the land of milk and honey. However, the plural would be expected: "...where milk and honey flow".

Life is not a pony farm

The saying, which has been appearing in everyday German language since around the 2000s, points to the harsh realities of life and warns against naïve illusions, has made an appearance as the title of an album by the German punk band the Schröders from 2001, among other things. A webcomic series by author Sarah Burrini, which has been published since 2009, also bears this title. The saying also appeared repeatedly in the TV series Stromberg. A Facebook page with the saying had around one million likes in January 2016.

Instead of "pony farm", the quotation has been used before with terms such as "girls' boarding school", "wishful thinking", "sugarcoating" or "picnic". In 2009, the short story collection Das Leben ist keine Waldorfschule by the German author Misha Verollet was published.

A slightly more optimistic variation is: "Life is a pony farm and the stable needs to be mucked out."

Life is short, art is long

"Life is short, art (lasts) long." is the beginning of the aphorisms published under the name of the Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos. In Latin, this sentence lives on under Vita brevis, ars longa and was handed down by the Roman poet Seneca in his writing "De brevitate vitae" - "On the brevity of life". There it says in 1,1:

It is not only the medical art that takes a long time to reach perfection.

This is the Berlin air

These words come from the operetta Frau Luna by Paul Lincke, which tells of Berliners who landed on the moon and were arrested by moon guards. They remember their native Berlin air:

Berlin air is synonymous with the social and cultural climate in the city of Berlin.

The next game is always the hardest game!

This well-known statement comes from a circular letter written by the German national football coach Sepp Herberger to the national players on 20 August 1954. This sentence is often quoted in a slightly modified form:

Another sentence by Herberger can also be seen in this context:

The football player and coach Matthias Sammer varied Herberger's sentence to:

After the World Cup triumph at the 1954 Football World Cup, the heroes of Bern were celebrated at home for weeks. Herberger was worried about the fitness of his players during all the honours and receptions. Already at the World Cup victory celebration in Munich, he said to striker Hans Schäfer:

Herberger wanted to bring his players back down to earth and make it clear to them that they should not rest on their laurels. The title holders then lost to Belgium 0:2 in front of 70,000 spectators in Brussels.

The journalist Christoph Biermann later called Herberger's wisdom Herbergerisms.

The horse does not eat cucumber salad

To test the transmission quality of the first telephone set he developed, Philipp Reis contacted a friend. The words were not to be guessed in case they arrived imperfectly. The story goes back to a teacher colleague who describes in his memoirs a demonstration in the Reis house: Reis' brother-in-law was reading a book over the phone in the garden, Reis repeated aloud to the audience the text he had eavesdropped on the recipient. The colleague countered that he might know the book by heart:

Rice didn't understand exactly what the horse was eating and thought the sun was made of sugar, but the colleague was still convinced.

The principle of hope

The Principle of Hope is a three-volume work by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, who wrote it between 1938 and 1947 in exile in the USA. Originally, his main work was to be called "The dreams of a better life".

1. The first volume comprises "Little Daydreams" (report), the philosophical centrepiece "Anticipatory Consciousness" (groundwork) and "Desired Images in the Mirror" (transition).
2. The second volume analyses the "Grundrisse einer besseren Welt" (Construction).
3. The third volume "Wunschbilder des erfüllten Augenblicks" (Identity).

The cunning beast did it for the sake of rhyme

This is the last line of the nonsense poem Das ästhetische Wiesel by Christian Morgenstern:

The quote is usually used to comment on courses of action that one cannot comprehend.

The round has to go into the square

This quote is also said to have come from football coach Sepp Herberger, who wanted to express laconically that the goal of a football match is to get the round ball into the square goal. But the originator was former Bundesliga coach Helmut Schulte, who said in highly simplified language:

The author Helmut Schümann called his book on the history of the Bundesliga Das Runde muss ins Eckige (The round has to go into the square) and thus picked up on this much quoted phrase from sports journalism.

The title of a study by Controlling Professor Jörn Littkemann at the Fernuniversität Hagen is "Das Runde muss ins Eckige - FernUniversität: Fußball als Wirtschaftsfaktor". It states:

The destiny of man is man

These words are spoken in Bertolt Brecht's play The Mother by the mother of a young communist who was killed. They want to explain to her that man cannot do without God, especially in suffering:

To which she replies:

Here Brecht reformulates a thought by Karl Marx, who wrote in the introduction to his Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right that man is the highest being for man.

Fate puts the plane to work

In the magic fairy tale with song Der Verschwender (The Prodigal), written by Ferdinand Raimund in 1834, the master carpenter Valentin sings the famous Hobellied. In it, with regard to the difference between rich and poor, it says at the end of the first stanza:

Being determines consciousness

This is a common abbreviation of a quote by Karl Marx, who writes in the preface to his Critique of Political Economy that the conditions of production result in a certain consciousness:

This looks very clear

With these words, the main character in Loriot's film Oedipussi describes the meagre but noble meal in a fine French restaurant, diplomatically expressing his disappointment at the modest portion sizes in the gourmet restaurant.

The phrase has now become an idiom used in comparable situations.

These are the practitioners of the world....

"Those who changed over night, / Who profess every state, / These are the practitioners of the world, / You might as well call them rags."

These mocking verses by Bogislav von Selchow on the supporters of the Weimar Republic were held up - with the softening of "different" in place of "lumpen" - to Finance Minister Otto Klepper in the session of the Prussian parliament on 16 December 1931 by the German Nationalist MPs Hansjoachim von Rohr and Joseph Kaufhold. In his memoirs Im Zeugenstand der Geschichte - Antworten zum Thema Hitler (In the Witness Stand of History - Answers on the Subject of Hitler), the Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan reports that "as early as 1933, [in order] not to extend too friendly a welcome to the onrushing post hunters, [...] in the entrance to the Gauleitung in Halle he greeted the many bourgeois souls who were hurrying after the victory and now finally wanted to be there with the wall slogan by Bogislaw von Selchow". The fact that, seventy years after the fall of National Socialism in Germany, this is still considered a catchphrase makes one wonder.

The game is off

Das Spiel ist aus is the German title of the French feature film Les jeux sont faits from 1947, based on a screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre. The title quotes the announcement of the croupier at roulette:

For the two main characters from the realm of the dead, a return to life is not possible because they do not succeed in realising their love in one day.

The miller's delight is to wander

The question of why millers, of all people, should have a particular penchant for hiking is answered automatically when you know that the lyrics to this folk song were written by the poet Wilhelm Müller.

The song begins with the following verses:

The Word for Sunday

Das Wort zum Sonntag is one of the oldest television programmes on ARD. On Saturday evenings, it features short ecclesiastical reflections by a representative of the two major Christian denominations.

The title is quoted in the sense of a serious exhortation.

The miracle is faith's dearest child

This sceptical sentence is a quotation from Goethe's Faust I and immediately follows the words with which Faust states his loss of faith:

In a sermon on Mark 8:22-26 in August 2007, Wilfried Härle takes up this Goethe quote:

The goal is nothing, the movement everything

This maxim of the workers' movement, which wanted to achieve socialism not through revolution but exclusively through a policy of social reform, was thus first formulated in 1897 by the social democratic theorist Eduard Bernstein in the journal Die Neue Zeit.

Franz Walter shows how controversial this sentence was under the heading How Bernstein made the SPD shake:

This was followed by half a decade of bitter dispute, which bears the historical name Revisionism Controversy.

Today, Bernstein's words are used as a rebuke when the dispute over direction in a political grouping has become more important than the common goal.

That the soft water in motion over time defeats the mighty stone

These verses come from Bertolt Brecht's poem Legend of the Creation of the Book of Taoteking on the Way of Laozi into Emigration. It tells how the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi, on his way to emigration, meets a tax collector who wants to know what insights his reflections on the world have led to. When he asks, "Did he get anything out of it?" he gets the answer:

The source is probably the Latin proverb Gutta cavat lapidem non vi sed saepe cadendo. In 1986, the futurologist Robert Jungk published a volume of essays entitled Und Wasser bricht den Stein.

Standing there like Buridan's donkey

This phrase means that someone cannot decide between two things of equal value and refers to a parable attributed to the medieval French philosopher Johannes Buridan, according to which a hungry donkey would starve to death from indecision before two equal bundles of hay. The basic idea comes from the Greek philosopher Aristotle's On Heaven and is taken up in Buridan's commentary using the example of a dog. The term Buridan's donkey was possibly invented by Buridan's opponents.

It's not the end of the world

With these words begins a hit song sung by Zarah Leander in the 1941/1942 film Die große Liebe. The film tells the love story between an air force officer and a famous vaudeville singer and was one of the "hold-out films" intended to distract people from the events of the war. The refrain of the song begins with the following verses:

Bruno Balz wrote the song together with "Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh'n" in the summer of 1941 at Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albert-Strasse, or Christmas 1941, in the 24 hours after his release from prison following the intervention of his writing partner Michael Jary. One could interpret the text as one wished: Either the world will not end from the hail of bombs or from the "evilness of the Nazis".

De gustibus non est disputandum

The Latin phrase "De gustibus non est disputandum" means "One should not argue about taste". However, the phrase does not originate from antiquity. The French gastrosophist Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin derived this phrase from Spanish, where it says:

Scholastic philosophy states:

Just as there are infinite shades of colour, there are also infinite flavours.

De mortuis nil (= nihil) nisi bene

This Latin saying goes back to the Greek sage Chilon of Sparta, who, according to Diogenes Laertius, is said to have said in Greek:

In other words, if you don't know anything good to say about a dead person, then you shouldn't say anything at all about him.

The Latin saying is still used today, as in the following examples:

• "De mortuis nil nisi bene? - On Karl May's alleged mental disorder".
• "Edward Teller has died: De mortuis nihil nisi bene"
• "De mortuis nil nisi bene: This applies to the dead. But there is no need to spread half-truths about the living, certainly not at funeral ceremonies."

Your wish was the father of the thought

In the original English version of William Shakespeare's drama Henry IV, the King says to the Prince of Wales:

Prince Harry had thought his father, who was asleep on his sickbed, was dead and had taken his crown to wear as his legitimate successor.

The saying is quoted today in the modified form "The wish was father of the thought" when one wants to imply that something is based on wishful thinking.

Déjà vu

Déjà vu experience [deʒaˈvy] (French: "already seen"; also memory illusion or déjà vu for short), also called déjà entendu phenomenon [deʒaɑ̃tɑ̃ˈdy] (French: "already heard") or déjà vécu experience [deʒaveˈky] (French: "already lived"). The term "already lived" refers to a psychological phenomenon that manifests itself in the feeling of having experienced, seen or dreamt a completely new situation in exactly the same way before. This is not a false perception, but a paradoxical emotional experience.

The term itself was coined by the French psychologist Émile Boirac in his book L'Avenir des sciences psychiques (The Future of the Psychical Sciences).

The opposite of the déjà vu experience, namely the feeling of strangeness in a familiar environment, is called a jamais vu experience [ʒamɛˈvy] (French: "never seen") and can occur in similar circumstances.

Well known to the Office

This old-fashioned formula was popularised by Heinrich von Kleist's comedy Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug), where Walter, the court councillor, abbreviates Judge Adam's awkward insistence on formalities with the following words:

The words are used jokingly today when you want to express that you know someone very well because they have already attracted disagreeable attention.

Far from the eye, near to the heart

This farewell formula, often used in connection with deaths, is found in the poem of the same name by Ludwig Jacobowski:

Far from the eye, near to the heart!

When I saw the old epitaph

In the sunken marble stone,

Then I remembered my dead love.

Oh God, I have written a thousand times

The same song from the same agony,

And yet there was none like this one:

Far from the eye, near to the heart!

The origin, however, is probably much older and not more closely known, and can therefore be attributed to the vernacular.

Nothing can be sworn to the engineer

This much-quoted phrase is put into the mouth (or beak) of the Disney character Daniel Düsentrieb by the translator Erika Fuchs. In the comic series, Daniel Düsentrieb is a genius inventor who probably reminded Mrs Fuchs of her husband Günter Fuchs, a factory owner and inventor. Günter Fuchs built everything in the house himself, right down to the furniture. When it came to technical things in the comic stories, Erika Fuchs consulted her husband:

Her husband, however, was not only versed in technical matters, he was also a specialist in quotations from the classics. Her translations - unlike the English originals - contained countless hidden quotations and literary allusions.

The saying that is almost always referred to as their creation: "Dem Ingeniör ist nichts zu schwör" is a variation of the first line of Heinrich Seidel's Ingenieurlied from 1871:

Giving to the emperor what is the emperor's

This expression goes back to a quotation from the Gospel according to Matthew, where Jesus, pointing to the coin with the image of the emperor, says in response to the Pharisees' question about the interest groschen:

Today, the expression is used in the sense of "fulfilling one's duty to the authorities".

The man can be helped

This sentence from Friedrich Schiller's drama The Robbers is often quoted in the form "The man can be helped".

With this statement, Karl Moor, who became a murderer and rebel against the social order, admits at the end of the play "that two people like me would ruin the whole structure of the moral world" and wants to turn himself in. Since there is a thousand louis d'or on his capture, he wants to give a poor day labourer with eleven children the opportunity to earn the bounty:

"One could admire me for that." (After some reflection.) "I remember speaking to a poor rogue when I came over, who works at day wages and has eleven living children - One has offered a thousand louis d'or who will deliver the great robber alive. The man can be helped." (He leaves.)

The thanks, lady, I do not desire

Friedrich Schiller's ballad Der Handschuh is about a questionable demonstration of love. A court maiden deliberately drops her glove into the arena with wild animals and then asks a knight who is courting her to fetch the glove. The knight does indeed enter the arena and retrieves the glove. But then he behaves differently than everyone expects:

We leave heaven to the angels and the sparrows

This verse comes from Heinrich Heine's cycle of poems Deutschland. A Winter's Tale. In it, Heine criticises the prevailing spirit in Restoration Germany. In the first poem, he opposes people's hope for a better hereafter:

"A new song, a better song,
O friends, I will compose for you!
We already
want to
build the kingdom of heaven here on earth.
...
Yes sweet peas for everyone,
As soon as the pods burst!
We leave heaven to the
angels and the sparrows."

Modesty adorns the youth

This quotation is a transposition of the words with which, in Franz Grillparzer's drama Die Ahnfrau, the youthful hero Jaromir is admonished by the old Count Zdenko von Borotin not to exaggerate his modesty:

Whether the joking saying "Modesty is an adornment, but one gets further without it" has its origin in this seems questionable.

All the livelong day

This expression is found at the beginning of Philipp Jacob Düringer's poem Des Mädchens Klage:

In the poem, the girl describes her grief for her deceased lover.

All is pure to the pure

"To the pure all things are pure" is a biblical quotation from the Letter to Titus. There the apostle Paul writes in Greek:

This is an exhortation to rebuke legal false teachers. Paul states that everything is pure for the pure, but nothing is pure for the unbelievers, because their attitude is also impure. Therefore, Christians do not need food, washing and clothing regulations.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche reverses this sentence as follows:

The Lord gives it to His own in their sleep

"The Lord giveth to his own in his sleep" is a quotation from the 127th Psalm, a song of trust, and today is proverbial for children of fortune:

To these lucky children, one sermon says:

Neither ox nor donkey stops socialism in its tracks

This slogan is often attributed to the co-founder of the SPD, August Bebel, but there is no record of him using it. It was first recorded in the summer of 1886 as an anonymous guestbook entry at the Spindler Tower, which later became the Müggelturm in the outskirts of Berlin.

In 1989, Erich Honecker, Chairman of the GDR's Council of State, picked up on this phrase when the VEB Kombinat Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" in Erfurt succeeded in producing a 32-bit microprocessor. Honecker's statement of 14 August 1989 appeared on the front page of the SED newspaper Neues Deutschland on 15 August 1989 and attracted attention because it was the only public appearance of the seriously ill Honecker between July and September. At the same time, 200,000 GDR tourists were in Hungary, many of whom did not want to return to the GDR.

Honecker, however, praised socialism and said "that the Western media's cries of triumph over the failure of the socialist conception of society are not worth the money spent on it".

Honecker repeated the slogan again on 6 October 1989 in his speech on the 40th anniversary of the GDR in the Palace of the Republic in the presence of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. The phrase was now perceived by the public as a stubborn slogan of perseverance. Gorbachev's response is often quoted as "He who is late is punished by life." quoted. There is a cartoon on this by the Austrian cartoonist Horst Haitzinger.

The ox and donkey are attributed to the depictions of the Christmas story in the Gospel according to Luke. But the guest book entry of the Spindler Tower contains a reference to the Prussian Minister of the Interior Robert Viktor von Puttkamer, who was in charge of the persecution of socialists.

Not seeing the wood for the trees

This expression comes from Christoph Martin Wieland's verse poem Musarion, oder die Philosophie der Grazien, published in 1768:

The meaning of this turn of phrase is that too many details can obscure the view of the whole.

When I think of Germany at night...

"If I think of Germany at night, / Then I am deprived of sleep". is the beginning of Heinrich Heine's poem Nachtgedanken, which he wrote in 1843:

Today, the beginning of the poem is often used to criticise conditions in Germany. However, such criticism can only be read into Heine's poem on the surface. In fact, Nachtgedanken is very specifically about the fact that Heine - who lives in Paris - had not seen his elderly mother, Betty Heine, for twelve years:

The poem ends with the following verse:

For all guilt is avenged on earth

In Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the title character listens to the song of a harpist burdened with mysterious guilt who holds the "heavenly powers" responsible for his fate. The second stanza of the song reads thus:

For Brutus is an honourable man

The Roman politician and general Marcus Antonius says in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar in his famous funeral oration to Gaius Iulius Caesar:

At Caesar's corpse, Antony first shakes hands with the conspirators. But then he asks Caesar's ghost to forgive him for making peace with the conspirators. Marcus Iunius Brutus wants to speak to the people himself and justify Caesar's killing, but at the latter's request allows Antony to take the body to the forum and also speak there before the assembled crowd.

After Brutus' speech, the people at first consider Caesar a tyrant and the act justified. But then Marcus Antonius begins his incendiary speech against Brutus:

With rhetorical skill he finally succeeds in turning the prevailing opinion and inciting the people to revolt against the conspirators.

Because one thing is certain: the pension

This slogan was put on election posters by the German Labour Minister Norbert Blüm in 1986. Since this statement is no longer believed, it has often been parodied and quoted since then. Twenty years later, for example, Hanno Beck wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung under the headline "Because one thing is certain - the pension cut":

It must be added, however, that this statement does not refer to either the retirement age or the pension amount. In September 2008, Blüm wrote under the headline "The pension was safe" in the SüddeutscheZeitung:

...for they know not what they do

"...for they know not what they do" is the German title of the US film Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean, which is about rebellious but also misunderstood teenagers.

The original English title could be translated as "rebel without a cause". Instead, its German version refers to the account of Jesus' crucifixion and the first of his seven last words:

The plot of the film hardly gave cause for such a reference. The German distributor, however, obviously wanted to tie in with the success of the previous James Dean film Jenseits von Eden (Beyond Eden) by using a biblical quotation again in the film's title, which alluded to Cain and Abel in Genesis (4:16 LUT): "So Cain departed from the presence of the LORD and dwelt in the land of Nod, beyond Eden, toward the east".

For what you have in black and white you can carry home with confidence

This quote, which has become a proverb, comes from Johann Wolfgang Goethe's drama Faust I.

Mephistopheles says there to the pupil:

The pupil, who had previously said to Mephistopheles, "All this makes me as dizzy as if a mill wheel were going round in my head," now says:

The background is the idea that black ink or printer's ink written or printed on white paper is more permanent than the fleeting word that can be forgotten or forged.

The eagle has landed.

The words with which Neil Armstrong, as commander of the Lunar Module, announced the landing on the moon were:

However, the first words after the moon landing were different, some technical information was passed on by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong shortly before.

Tranquility Base was the landing site in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility). Eagle was the name of the Lunar Module (English: Eagle).

The Eagle Has Landed is a 1976 war film directed by John Sturges and based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Jack Higgins.

Appetite comes with eating

This saying comes from the French quote L'appétit vient en mangeant, found in François Rabelais' 1535 adventure novel about the two giants Gargantua and Pantagruel:

("Appetite comes in eating, says Angeston, but thirst is lost in drinking". Angeston is the wound physician Jerome of Hangest.)

Pantagruel, the son of Gargantua, stands out here for his particular voracity.

This expression is also used in a figurative sense, where "appetite" often means greed.

Totò, Neapolitan comedian and actor, had a different opinion: Si dice che l'appetito vien mangiando, ma in realtà viene a star digiuni, "They say appetite comes when eating, but in reality it comes when fasting."

The doctor helps, nature heals

"The physician helps, nature heals." or in Latin Medicus curat, natura sanat. is an aphorism that is probably already based on the teachings of the Corpus Hippocraticum.

The sentence should make clear,

1. that the actual healing happens in the patient,
2. that there is a natural course of the disease
3. and that a good doctor takes the natural processes into account.

The ball is round

This much-quoted banal statement comes from the former German national football coach Sepp Herberger and is usually quoted in connection with other football wisdom, such as "A game lasts 90 minutes" and "The ball always has the best condition". The latter statement is meant to emphasise that it is better to let the ball "run" than to run after the ball yourself ("we let the ball run, it doesn't sweat").

Herberger also did not want to express that a football is a spherical structure, but that nothing is decided as long as the ball is rolling.

Thorsten Langenbahn writes in his book Die Populärsten Fußballirrtümer:

An exhibition in which the German Football Association paid historical-critical tribute to a century of its history in the Gasometer at CentrO Oberhausen was held under the motto The ball is round.

Der Ball ist rund is also the title of a Herberger biography by Karl-Heinz Schwarz-Pich, while Lothar Mikos and Harry Nutt called their Herberger biography Als der Ball noch rund war.

The Bundesliga coach Gyula Lóránt says of the above quote:

Coach Rudi Gutendorf says with regard to the peculiar behaviour of the play equipment:

The report of my death has been greatly exaggerated

When the US writer Mark Twain was on a lecture tour of Europe, a rumour spread in the United States that he had died suddenly. Mark Twain then cabled the following correction to America:

Most often cited as:

The responsible newspaper man at the New York Journal countered calmly:

He needs a long spoon who eats with the devil

In William Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (1592-94), Dromio of Syracuse says to Antipholos of Syracuse in the Fourth Stuff, Third Scene:

Also in the variants Who eats with the devil needs a long spoon, He must have a long spoon, He who eats with the devil should be able to eat porridge or He needs a long spoon that eats with the devil, the Shakespeare quote (He has need of a long spoon that eats with the devil) became a winged word, often used in the sense of having got involved with the wrong people, for example in the case of the Brandenburg consistory president and later prime minister Manfred Stolpe, who was accused of having got too involved with the state security service in GDR times.

The bureaucrat does his duty

This statement comes from Carl Zeller's 1894 operetta Der Obersteiger. The play is set in southern Germany and begins at the princely Marienzeche mine. The following song text is found in the second act:

Zeller was a full-time ministerial councillor and head of the Arts Department in the Ministry of Education. With this text he expresses his view on the subject of civil service.

The only dung on which nothing grows is the pessimist

This statement on pessimism comes from former German President Theodor Heuss, alluding to the importance of manure as fertiliser in agriculture.

The banker Carl Fürstenberg said on the same subject:

... the tongues of women never rest.

Second line of the penultimate stanza from the ballad Die Sonne bringt es an den Tag by Adelbert von Chamisso. In it, Adelbert von Chamisso describes the story of Master Nikolas, who, out of need and anger, has slain a man during his wanderings. With his last ounce of strength, the latter gasps, "The sun will bring it to day." Whenever the sun shines, Master Nikolas murmurs to himself, "You're not going to get it." When his wife hears this, she presses him until he tells her about his manslaughter. Although he asks her to keep her mouth shut, she tells the story of the "Gevatterin". Thus the manslaughter becomes known. Master Nikolas is put on the wheel.

An alley for freedom!

It is said that Arnold Winkelried grabbed a bundle of lances from the Habsburg knights at the battle of Sempach in 1386 and, impaling himself, opened a breach for the Confederates. According to legend, he shouted beforehand:

The better-known version of his last words, however, is "Der Freiheit eine Gasse!" (An alley for freedom!). …

... which became popular in the German national movement of the 19th century, such as in the refrain of Georg Herwegh's "Freedom Song":

Text published in: Georg Herwegh: Gedichte eines Lebendigen, Volume I (1841), which was first published anonymously in Switzerland.

This call is a quotation from Theodor Körner's poem Aufruf, published in 1813:

Max von Schenkendorf's poem Schill's Ghostly Voice from 1809 still said:

Franz von Papen's autobiography Der Wahrheit eine Gasse quotes Körner.

The God Who Made Iron Grow

These are the opening words of the patriotic poem Vaterlandslied by Ernst Moritz Arndt, the first stanza of which reads thus:

Arndt wrote these verses immediately before the Coalition Wars of 1813-1815, which liberated Germany from Napoleon's rule. The composer Albert Methfessel was inspired by this text to write a martial melody.

Although Arndt's verses were inspired by hatred of Napoleon Bonaparte, no current political events are mentioned in the song's lyrics. Later, the song was re-purposed to Otto von Bismarck:

The Great Zampano

The Great Zampano (Italian: Zampanò) is one of the three main characters in the 1954 film La Strada - The Song of the Road by Italian director Federico Fellini.

Through this film character, the term Zampano has a negative connotation. Anthony Quinn plays a boastful man who loudly puts himself on stage and tries to convince his astonished fellow men that he can even make the impossible possible. Zampanò, a hulking showman, flaunts his strength in marketplaces, the highlight of his performances being when he bends a hook with the strength of his chest muscles.

Today, the term "Zampano" is often used as a synonym for someone who pulls all the strings. The expression "acting like the big shot" means as much as embodying the star in a certain scene. About Joschka Fischer, for example, it is said:

The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away

This resigned statement comes from the Old Testament book of Job, where the righteous sufferer Job (Job) says:

Job is struck with terrible suffering by Satan. He is portrayed as a pious man whose faithfulness to God is tested, for one day Satan comes before God and claims that Job's piety is only because God protects him and his possessions. God then allows Satan to test Job.

The biblical book deals with the question of how it can be that the just God tolerates evil happening to good people.

The eavesdropper on the wall hears his own shame'.

Anyone who tries to actively listen to what is being said behind a door or wall must expect to hear less than flattering things about themselves. This experience is also recorded in Wanders' German Dictionary of Proverbs.

See also: The eavesdropper on the wall hears his own shame.

Jürgen Klinsmann and me, we're a good trio

The Mannheim professional footballer Fritz Walter said in an interview:

He then corrects himself a little later:

Born in Heidelberg, Fritz Walter played with Jürgen Klinsmann at VfB Stuttgart and was discovered and promoted by his namesake Fritz Walter, the 1954 World Champion, in Mannheim.

Walter made a similar slip of the tongue when he said to the press after a match:

The captain is the last to disembark

"The captain is the last to disembark" or "the captain goes down with his ship" is a maritime rule and tradition according to which a captain has the ultimate responsibility for and must save his ship, crew and passengers.

The small difference

When people jokingly talk about the little difference, they usually mean the male member as a symbol of the difference between man and woman.

The expression comes from Erich Kästner's novel Fabian, published in 1931, where the exclamation "Long live the little difference!" alludes to the difference between men and women:

The term became known primarily as the title of a book by the feminist Alice Schwarzer, who published a book in 1975 entitled Der kleine Unterschied und seine großen Folgen. In it, she advocates the so-called equality feminism, which was also advocated by Simone de Beauvoir. The book was translated into eleven languages and made Schwarzer the best-known figure of the German women's movement.

In 2002, she published a book entitled The Big Difference: Against the Division of People into Men and Women, in which - 25 years after her world bestseller - she asks what has happened in the meantime on the front of women's emancipation.

The Congress dances

The quotation was written in 1814 during the Congress of Vienna, when Vienna was the most important metropolis in Europe. The hosts of the congress endeavoured to make the stay of the high-ranking personalities as pleasant as possible. The succession of convivial events, balls and other amusements led Charles Joseph Prince von Ligne to coin the term "Dancing Congress". In a letter to Talleyrand dated 1 November 1814, Ligne wrote:

The quote is also used in the 1931 film of the same name, The Congress Dances.

The war feeds the war

War feeds war is a quotation from Friedrich Schiller's Die Piccolomini, the second part of the Wallenstein trilogy set in the Thirty Years' War. There, Schiller has Isolani, the general of the Croats (particularly notorious as plunderers), say in the first act:

War is the father of all things

This statement comes from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, according to whom the principle of the world is that there is something constant that is constantly changing by flipping, from one pole to the other:

The much-quoted sentence reads like this in ancient Greek:

The publicist Udo Marquardt wrote about this dictum:

Marquardt goes on to explain:

The poet Erich Fried published the following very well-known pun in his novel Ein Soldat und ein Mädchen (A Soldier and a Girl) under the title "Spruch" (Saying), which takes up Heraclitus' statement:

War is the continuation of politics by other means

The most famous quote by the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz correctly reads:

What is meant by this is that the military is always subordinate to politics. Politics determines by purpose the use of military force, i.e. war, as a means of resolving a conflict. Accordingly, every war has a purpose, which essentially consists of "imposing our will on the enemy". This purpose, however, is determined by politics.

Clausewitz defined the aim, means and end of war as an instrument of politics in this way:

The aim is to "throw down the enemy and thereby render him incapable of any distant resistance".

The eavesdropper on the wall hears his own shame

What is meant by this is that we sometimes overhear or actively eavesdrop on conversations that are not meant for us, and thereby also learn unpleasant truths or opinions about ourselves. Similarly: The eavesdropper behind the wall hears his own shame. Also: Whoever eavesdrops behind the wall hears his own shame.

See also: The eavesdropper on the wall hears his own shame.

The Last of the Mohicans

The Last of the Mohicans is an 1826 historical novel by the American author James Fenimore Cooper, whose plot is set at the time of the French and Indian War. It is the second novel in the Leatherstocking series about the trapper Natty Bumppo. The novel deals with the demise of North American Indian tribes at the hands of advancing European settlers.

During the so-called French and Indian War between the French and the British and the Indian tribes allied with each of them, there are disputes over the British Fort William Henry. While the Hurons are allied with the French, the Mohicans are on the side of the British. When the fort is captured by the French, a massacre takes place.

The tribal name Mohican is a neologism of Cooper. The name of this fictitious tribe was created by drawing together the names of the two New England tribes Mahican and Mohegan.

As early as the 19th century, the phrase "the last of the Mohicans" became proverbial for many last witnesses or supporters of an idea:

• The last Mohicans of CB radio
• The last Mohicans of church youth work
• The Last Mohicans in the GDR's State Economy

The pilot disembarks

Even though Otto von Bismarck did everything he could to eliminate potential successors, in the 1880s there was a call for a risk-taking foreign policy. After the short reign of Frederick III, the new Emperor Wilhelm II and Bismarck faced each other with two unequal personalities.

On 15 March 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm finally withdrew his support from the Chancellor because of his course of conflict. Two days later, Bismarck handed Wilhelm his letter of resignation. The public reacted with relief to the resignation. Theodor Fontane wrote:

The English magazine Punch then published a cartoon by Sir John Tenniel on Bismarck's dismissal entitled Dropping the Pilot, which is usually translated in German as Der Lotse geht von Bord.

"The pilot disembarks" was the headline on the cover of the news magazine Der Spiegel of 20 September 1982, on which the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was pictured as the outgoing pilot.

Pilots in navigation assume the function of a ship's master for a limited time and distance on a particular waterway and perform their duties as advisors to the master of a ship.

The Man Without Qualities

The novel The Man Without Qualities is the main work of the Austrian writer Robert Musil. Through this novel, Musil also coined the word Kakania (from "k. k." for "imperial-royal") as an ironic term for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The main character of the novel is Ulrich, who fulfils various professional roles, e.g. as a mathematician, engineer or political advisor. However, he experiences all these roles as constrictions and therefore offers up his much-appointed utopian "sense of possibility" in a one-year "holiday from life" to become a better person. He is the symbol of modern man, no longer has an all-encompassing spiritual home and sets himself apart from all other people in his specialised knowledge. He recognises the arbitrariness of world views and yet constantly adheres to new, more absurd theories.

The book title is often used - even in a modified form - in other contexts. For example, an article entitled Man without Qualities: Living and Working in the 21st Century says of white-collar workers and civil servants:

Man is born free, and everywhere he lies in chains

The French-Swiss writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Social Contract:

There is the short version of this assertion:

Man is what he eats

Ludwig Feuerbach's review of Jakob Moleschott's Teaching of Food for the People became famous for its casual play on words:

Man is neither angel nor beast, and misfortune wills that he who wants to make an angel out of him should make a beast out of him.

This pessimistic insight comes from the thoughts of the philosopher Blaise Pascal and reads in the original French:

According to Pascal's core anthropological thesis, man is a "being of the middle", neither angel nor demon, but half angel and half demon, for there is both possibility in him. Moreover, Pascal states:

The philosopher Karl Popper summarised Pascal's thoughts with regard to Marxism-Leninism on the one hand and National Socialism on the other into the following sentence:

Man does not live by bread alone

is a Bible word ((Deut 8:3 EU, Mt 4:4 EU)). It became the title of a book by Vladimir Dudintsev (more here). This book was published during the thaw period after Khrushchev's secret speech in Moscow in February 1956, with which de-Stalinisation entered a new phase. A translation into German appeared in 1958.

Human needs and motivations are named, among others, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs by the psychologist Abraham Maslow.

The Moor has done his duty

"The Moor has done his duty; / the Moor can go." is a quote from Friedrich Schiller's drama The Conspiracy of Fiesco in Genoa. In the original, however, it does not mean "debt", but "work".

In the drama, the third act reads:

Fiesco. I hear footsteps. It's them. Fellow, you deserve your own gallows where no son of Adam has yet fidgeted. Go into the antechamber till I ring.

Moor (departing). The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go. (Ab.)

Gianettino Doria sees a danger in Fiesco and wants to have him eliminated by the Moor Muley Hassan. However, the Moor betrays the assassination attempt and provides Fiesco with the man with whose help he can carry out his counter-intrigue.

The murderer is always the gardener

The murderer is always the gardener is both the title of a song by Reinhard Mey and a line of its refrain:

The murderer was the gardener again,

and he is already planning the next coup.

The murderer is always the gardener,

and it strikes mercilessly!

The phrase is generally used to refer to stereotypes in patterns of thought and action; in the field of crime literature it is also often used as a self-deprecating reverence to stereotypes of one's own genre. This ironic reverence is often also found in reviews and synopses of works of crime literature.

• "Reinhard Mey sang: 'The murderer is always the gardener'. And whenever parties stumble over unlawful financial transactions, the treasurers are the scapegoats." (Article in the Zürcher Tages-Anzeiger)
• "The murderer is always the gardener! Or the butler? …“ (beginning of the synopsis of a crime novel published by Rowohlt Verlag)
• Der Mörder ist immer der Gärtner - eine kriminale Musikrevue (Title of a play Der Mörder ist immer der Gärtner - eine kriminale Musikrevue by Wolfgang Rumpf & Wolfgang Seppel (Berliner Bühnen Spring 2009))

The next winter is coming for sure

This was the slogan used by Rheinische Braunkohlenbrikett-Verkauf GmbH from 1960 onwards to advertise that its customers were already stocking up on heating material for the winter in the summer, adding slogans like the following:

• "Put briquettes in the cellar now."
• "If you take briquettes in summer, you take care."

Although the slogan is protected by law, it is used by different companies today.

The East is Red

The East is Red (Chinese: 东方红; Dōngfāng Hóng) is a song in praise of the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong that almost assumed the status of a national anthem during the Cultural Revolution. The lyrics were written by a peasant from Shaanxi province.

Dong Fang Hong and Dong Fang Hong I are the names of Chinese satellites launched in the 1970s. When it arrives at the moon, the Chang'e-1 probe, launched in 2007, is said to radio the song The East is Red and other patriotic songs back to Earth.

The title of the song is also used in a completely different context in German. For example, an article about voting behaviour in the 2002 federal elections from an East-West perspective is titled as follows:

Der Osten ist Rot (The East is Red) is also the title of an album by Holger Czukay from 1984. On the record sleeve is printed a news item circulating in 1983 about a book in which the Beijing leadership warns against decadent rock music and instead recommends exemplary songs, such as "Die Fäkaliensammler steigen vom Berg herab" (The faeces collectors descend from the mountain).

Der Osten war rot is a book by Hans-Peter Bärtschi about the failed do-gooder in the former socialist states

The rest is silence

"The rest is silence." are the last words of Hamlet in William Shakespeare's drama of the same name:

(He dies.)

Today, people use this quote to express perplexity or their inability to say anything about a difficult matter.

The rest is silence is also the title of a film by Helmut Käutner from 1959.

The womb is still fertile from which this crawled

This quote with reference to National Socialism comes from the epilogue of Bertolt Brecht's play The Unstoppable Rise of Arturo Ui, which transfers Hitler's seizure and expansion of power to the gangster world. It says:

The shot heard around the world

The shot heard round the world is a well-known idiom in the USA that refers to the beginning of the American War of Independence. The phrase comes from the first stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn of 1837 and describes the impact of the Battle of Lexington and Concord at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts in 1775.

The verse reads:

The state is me

The guiding principle of absolutism, L'État, c'est moi, is attributed to the French Sun King Louis XIV, who is said to have said this sentence before Parliament on 13 April 1655. Parliament and the King sat together as a court of justice (Lit de justice).

The historian Adolphe Chéruel wrote in his work Histoire de l'Administration monarchique en France, published in 1855:

Dulaure (Histoire de Paris, 1853, p. 387) admittedly claims:

Louis consolidated the power of the crown by expanding the administration, by fighting the opposition of the nobility and by promoting the economy. Court culture was entirely tailored to the person of the ruler. His ostentatious appearance became the symbol of his outstanding position.

His last words, however, were: "I die, but the state will always remain". (Je meurs, mais l'État demeurera toujours. )

The ballot is stronger than the bullet

This was said by the US politician Abraham Lincoln during a speech in Bloomington (Illinois) in 1856:

The stuff dreams are made of

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of is a novel by Johannes Mario Simmel, whose title is based on a quote from William Shakespeare's drama The Tempest:

In this drama, the magician Prospero tells Ferdinand, the bridegroom of his daughter Miranda, in retrospect of his magic play, that the whole earth will dissolve and disappear without a trace.

Simmel's novel depicts a gigantic industrial apparatus in which the fabric for the dreams of millions is woven and the dream world of a man who sacrifices himself for the powerless.

The book title is often used in a different context. For example, it is the title of an article on the sleep hormone melatonin or an article on the methodology of Freudian interpretation of literary works.

The devil is a squirrel

This winged word can be understood ambiguously.

1. It denotes an absurd assertion that can be maintained from an illogical conclusion or only with rhetorical gimmicks.
2. Because of its red fur and agility, the squirrel is, in superstition, a manifestation of the devil. The saying "The devil is a squirrel" wants to express that evil or misfortune can lurk in the most unsuspicious guises, e.g. that of a squirrel.

See also: the devil is a squirrel (Wiktionary)

Death is a Master from Germany

This line from the Death Fugue by the poet Paul Celan is often quoted, especially in anti-fascist language, and can be found on posters and in murals.

The tourist destroys what he seeks by finding it

This quote by the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger is mostly used in discussions on the topic of soft or unsoft tourism.

The Austrian folklorist Hans Haid speaks of a "Goa in the Alps" and means by this:

US humourist Sam Ewing said on the same subject:

Madness, when it becomes epidemic, is called sanity

At present, this quotation is exclusively attributed to Oskar Panizza, the author of The Council of Love. But Panizza had only taken it over, distorting his source. In the essay Christus in psicho-patologischer Beleuchtung (Christ in psicho-patological light) in the Zürcher Diskuszjonen, he wrote: "As M. Jacobi already rightly said: 'Madness, when it becomes epidemic, is called reason.'"

Panizza's biographer Michael Bauer also concluded from the unprinted notebooks that he was a "psychiatrist Jacobi", without mentioning the first name. What was meant, however, was Maximilian Jacobi. In fact, however, the quotation is in a letter from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to Jakob Friedrich Fries dated 29 July 1808: "When madness becomes epidemic, says Hamann in a writing, it applies to sound reason." The philosopher Jacobi had thus excerpted the quotation from a writing by Johann Georg Hamann, also known as "the Magus in the North".

The list of those who gave wings to the quotation among educated people long before Panizza and interpreted it differently is long and includes theologians (J. Scheinert), jurists (Jodocus Temme), physicists (Karl Friedrich Zöllner) as well as doctors and psychologists such as Theodor Puschmann or Rudolf Leubuscher. They all correctly attributed the quotation to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Only the Berliner Gerichtszeitung of 4 May 1867 wrote, "there are times - says a German psychologist, Jacobi, - when madness becomes epidemic." Overall, in addition to the familiar citation, the variant: "Madness, when it becomes epidemic, gets the name of reason." is also frequently found.

The real Jacob

"This is the real McCoy" is supposed to mean, this is the right man or the right, long-sought means. The expression is also used in the form "This is not the real McCoy either" and then means as much as "This is not exactly the right thing either".

The expression is attributed to the apostle James the Elder, whose grave is said to be in the Spanish pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela, but whose bones were often assumed to be in other graves.

Other attempts at explanation trace the expression back to the biblical progenitor Jacob, who cheated his brother Esau out of the birthright and his father's blessing.

Der Wahre Jacob was a German satirical magazine founded in 1879 and published intermittently until 1933.

The physicist Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to Max Born about quantum mechanics:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

This proverbial saying is attributed to the English lexicographer Samuel Johnson and handed down by his biographer James Boswell:

In a similar form, the saying can also be found in the Scottish poet Walter Scott, who traces it back to an English theologian of the 17th century. Chesterton explicitly disagreed: "Only Calvinists can believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is precisely what it cannot be paved with."

US humourist Sam Ewing slightly modifies the saying by saying on the subject of the internet:

The last word in wisdom

At the end of his life, the blind Faust in Goethe's drama Faust II has a vision of a paradisiacal land that has been wrested from the sea and must be constantly defended against the tide. He comes to the following realisation:

Today, the words "not the last word in wisdom" mean that something is not the perfect solution. For example, an article in the daily newspaper Die Welt about Spinner GmbH is headed with the words "Cutting jobs is not the last word in wisdom".

The wind told me a song

These words come from a song by the pop poet Bruno Balz, whose refrain begins as follows:

In the 1937 film La Habanera, Zarah Leander sings this hit song that expresses the longing for a distant, past happiness. The film tells the story of a Swedish woman who has married a rich Puerto Rican but cannot find happiness on Puerto Rico. She patiently bears her suffering for ten years until a childhood friend suddenly appears and her fate turns around again.

The song subsequently became one of the Swedish Ufa star's most successful songs.

Enough words have been spoken, let me finally see deeds

This exhortation comes from the prelude at the theatre to Goethe's drama Faust I. In a conversation between the director, the theatre poet and the funny person, the director is of the opinion that what matters most in theatre is audience appeal. He does not accept the poet's objections and finally ends the dispute with these words.

The die is cast

The expression "crossing the Rubicon" is the term for a momentous decision, such as Caesar's crossing the Rubicon, because it unleashed civil war. When Caesar, after wavering for some time, decided to cross the Rubicon, he is said to have said alea iacta est.

On 10 January 49 BC Julius Caesar marched on the Rubicon, the border river to the demilitarised zone around Rome, which no Roman commander was allowed to approach with his troops, and first said:

While he was still standing there, a shepherd came, snatched the trumpet from a soldier, crossed the river and blew the alarm. Caesar then said:

According to Athenaeus of Naucratis, this sentence originally came from Menander. In the Life of Pompey, Plutarch reports that the phrase was uttered in Greek:

Suetonius gives a not quite literal translation Iacta alea est! Most often quoted Alea iacta est! ("The die is cast!") or Aleae iactae sunt! ("The die is cast!").

The one who

This colloquial expression has the meaning of "the one being talked about". It comes from the short Berlin local farce Das Fest der Handwerker by Louis Angely. In the play itself, however, it means "always the one who".

The Emperor's New Clothes

The Emperor's New Clothes (Danish: Kejserens Nye Klæder) is a fairy tale by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. It tells the story of a vain emperor who is deceived by two cunning swindlers. They promise to make him the most beautiful clothes, which will be invisible to anyone who is not fit for his office:

The hoax is only discovered when a child exclaims that the emperor has no clothes at all:

"The father said, 'Hear the voice of innocence,' and the one hissed to the other what the child had said.
But he's not wearing anything!' cried the whole crowd at last."

The singer Reinhard Mey sings about this theme in his song Des Kaisers neue Kleider, in which he questions the modern art business:

The toil of life

In the play Torquato Tasso by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Secretary of State Antonio Montecatino says in the fifth act:

Despotism tempered by sloppiness

With these words of his report "on the situation of the socialist movement in Austria", Victor Adler, co-founder of the Social Democratic Workers' Party, provoked "great hilarity" at the International Workers' Congress in Paris in 1889.

There are similar statements about other states:

The French writer Nicolas Chamfort, in his Caractères et Anecdotes, gives a witty man as the inventor of the following quotation:

(other translation: "... absolute monarchy tempered by joke words.")

After the assassination of the Russian Tsar Paul in 1801, a Russian prince said to the Hanoverian envoy Count Münster:

Deus ex machina

The Latin phrase Deus ex machina ("God from the machine") is a loan translation from the Greek ἀπὸ μηχανῆς Θεός ("apo mechanes theos") and originally denotes the appearance of a deity with the help of stage machinery.

In ancient tragedy, there were conflicts that could not always be resolved from within the plot. They were resolved from the outside through the surprising intervention of a deity who gave the events the decisive turn. The deus ex machina hovered above the stage in a hoisting machine or landed on the roof of the stage house. Swivel cranes were used, with the help of which the intervening deity could be hoisted onto the stage from outside.

A famous example can be found in the drama Iphigenia at the Taurians by the poet Euripides. There, the goddess Artemis appears over the temple at the last moment to save Iphigenia and Orestes from the wrath of the Taurian king Thoas and passes a just sentence to which everyone submits.

Being German means doing a thing for its own sake

The expression, which is usually used derisively, refers to actions that are not questioned and can be traced back to a statement by Richard Wagner that was meant differently. In his essay Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik, published in 1867, Wagner wrote:

German workers, the SPD wants to take away your villas in Ticino!

The graphic designer Klaus Staeck published an ironic political poster for the 1972 Bundestag elections showing a modernist villa in toxic yellow under a blue sky with the Fraktur typeface:

The poster, the irony of which did not meet with the SPD's undivided approval, now hangs in the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn. As a postcard and sticker, it reached a circulation of 70,000 copies.

Willi Winkler wrote in 2008 on Klaus Staeck's 70th birthday in the Süddeutsche Zeitung:

German Michel

The German Michel, the national personification of the Germans, probably goes back to the Archangel Michael (as patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire and later of Germany) or a certain Hans Michael Elias von Obentraut. The earliest documented tradition is found in a book of proverbs published by Sebastian Franck in 1541 - i.e. a few decades before Obentraut's birth. Here, the German Michel refers to a dolt and a fantasist.

Germany, united fatherland

"Germany, united fatherland" is a verse from Johannes R. Becher's Risen from Ruins, the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic:

After the GDR backed away from German reunification, the text became uncomfortable. In 1972, for example, Willy Brandt responded to Willi Stoph's statement that there were two German states by referring to the first verse:

With the transfer of power to Erich Honecker, the lyrics then disappeared from public view in the early 1970s, and the anthem was only performed instrumentally.

The word became more prominent in the public consciousness at the time of the fall of communism towards the end of 1989, partly replacing the word "We are the people".

Germany must live, and if we must die

This slogan comes from the poem Soldatenabschied by Heinrich Lersch:

This sentence can be found on numerous war memorials, for example at the Dammtor in Hamburg, but also as the motto of the military cemetery in Langemarck. The monument was regularly the target of paint bombs, graffiti and other actions.

In circles of the anti-Germans as well as parts of the Antifa, this slogan is turned around into "Germany must die so that we can live", Thus there is a song by the punk band Slime (band) with corresponding lyrics.

Germany above all!

The often misunderstood beginning of the Deutschlandlied "Germany, Germany above all, above all in the world" was not a call to subjugate non-German territories for August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben.

Kurt Tucholsky said about this:

The Scientific Service of the German Bundestag comments on the same topic as follows:

Germany's future lies on the water

This vision comes from a speech by the German Emperor Wilhelm II on the occasion of the inauguration of the Stettin Freeport in September 1898. With these words, Wilhelm expressed his conviction that Germany could only improve its position in world politics if, in addition to an expanded merchant navy, it also had a strong navy at its disposal for conquering and securing colonies.

Poetic freedom

To be a little more generous with historical facts in a work of fiction is poetic licence. The first time this term appears is in a work of natural science by the Roman scholar Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who writes in the chapter on lightning:

Fiction and truth

Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) is the abbreviated title of Goethe's autobiographical memoirs from the years 1749 to 1775. Goethe himself occasionally used the version "Wahrheit und Dichtung" (Truth and Poetry), but probably preferred the first version for tonal reasons. The full title is Aus meinem Leben. Poetry and Truth.

Today, we use this expression when we have doubts about whether an account really corresponds to the facts and suspect that the facts are invented.

Only the wind knows the answer

Die Antwort kennt nur der Wind (Only the Wind Knows the Answer) is the title of a novel by Johannes Mario Simmel, which was filmed in 1974 and which in turn takes up the refrain of the song Blowin' in the Wind by Bob Dylan. The pacifist song has three verses. Questions are asked that are answered each time with the same last line of lyrics:

In the German translation of the song lyrics:

The song was considered an anthem of the folk rock movement. This quote is often used to refer to leaving a question unanswered.

Poverty comes from the Powerteh

This saying goes back to a quotation from Fritz Reuter's work Ut mine Stromtid, where Inspector Bräsig concludes his speech at the Rahmstadt Reformverein with the following words:

The word "powerteh" is a verbalised form of the French word pauvreté, which means poverty.

The eyes of the world are upon you

In his order to land in Normandy on 6 June 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower said to his soldiers in English:

Eisenhower said in his address, among other things:

Similar formulations existed even before 1945. For example, the satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1931 under the headline Die Augen der Welt:

Today, the quotation is mainly used in variations:

• "The eyes of the world fixed on Vienna." (Summit 1961 Khrushchev - Kennedy)
• "The eyes of the fashion world are once again on Paris."

The axe in the house saves the carpenter

This quote - often used in reference to do-it-yourselfers - comes from Friedrich Schiller's drama Wilhelm Tell. It describes how Tell repairs the farm gate with an axe, his wife devotes herself to domestic chores and their son plays with bow and arrow. The conversation revolves around the boy, for the mother has something against shooting, while Tell praises the early practice. (see "Early practice makes perfect.") Then Tell's wife says what fear she endures when he goes into the mountains. At the end of the conversation, Tell, satisfied, examines his work and speaks the above words.

In the SüddeutscheZeitung it says under the headline You can build on these phrases about this famous quote:

The basis of a healthy order is a large wastepaper bin

With these words Kurt Tucholsky wants to suggest that it serves order if one gets rid of superfluous things. He writes this in a newspaper article with the meaningful title Das kann man noch gebrauchen -!

With a side swipe at the throwaway society in the United States, Tucholsky writes in the article:

The situation is different in Europe:

Tucholsky understands the inhibition to throw away goods, but writes:

The best of all possible worlds

The postulate that we live in the best of all possible worlds is part of the larger philosophical argument of the 17th century, according to which God could not have produced anything less than precisely the best of all possible worlds with the cosmos. He would not otherwise have been God, the perfect being.

From Voltaire's satirical novel Candide or Optimism comes the sentence:

Voltaire has his protagonist Candide undertake a voyage around the world with Pangloss, the distorted image of a philosopher. Pangloss sticks to his opinion despite shipwreck, earthquake, inquisition, illness and execution:

"This is the best of all possible worlds."

Candide retorts:

"If this is the best of all possible worlds, I want to see the rest of them first!"

The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Theodicy states:

The best wife of all

The Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon used this topos (also: "the best of wives") to describe his second wife Sara Kishon (née Lipovitz). She is the mother of his son Amir and daughter Renana. Sara Kishon herself wrote a satirical response to her husband's stories in 1996 entitled "My Beloved Liar. The Confessions of the Best Wife of All". In this book, she tells some of the stories already known from her husband's point of view, from her point of view.

The expression has entered the German vocabulary and is frequently used, such as:

• "The little book for the best of wives".
• "What does the best of wives have to say about that?"

The bombing of Russia begins in five minutes

With a microphone test on 11 August 1984, US President Ronald Reagan triggered a serious diplomatic crisis by saying shortly before a radio broadcast:

The media published this audio sample, which led to fierce criticism worldwide.

The White Man's Burden

Poem by Rudyard Kipling: The White Man's Burden

The earth has me again

This quotation comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drama Faust I, where the desperate Faust is about to reach for the vial of poison. But he is prevented from doing so by the chorus of angels who announce Easter morning ("Christ is risen") and exclaim:

The quote is used when one has just left a plane with relief or stepped ashore from a ship.

The earth be light unto thee!

This saying occurs as a grave saying in different variations:

"Light be unto thee the earth!"

"May the earth be light to you!"

In the Latin form, the saying goes:

"Sit terra tibi levis."

These words have been read on tombstones since ancient times. They go back to a passage in the Second Book of Elegies by the Roman poet Tibull and refer to a girl who died young. It says in Tibull:

"Terraque securae sit super ossa levis."

"And let the earth be light upon the bones of those who are borne."

Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven

This quotation comes from the Impromptus, which I will write in future in Stammbücher, by the writer Jean Paul, published in 1812. (Usually wrongly attributed to the novel The Invisible Lodge.) This insight was certainly not new at the time, but was brought to the point by Jean Paul:

By the "first parents", Jean Paul means the progenitors Adam and Eve, who were expelled from paradise but managed to retain the memory of it.

The writer Arthur Schnitzler comments on this quotation as follows:

The first will be last and the last will be first

This comforting reference comes from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus explains to his disciples during a discussion about who enters the kingdom of God and how:

"27 Then Peter answered and said unto him, Behold, we have left all, and followed thee: what shall we have for it? 28 And Jesus said to them: Verily I say unto you: Ye which have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve stools, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 29 And whosoever shall leave house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, the same shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit life eternal. 30 But many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first."

The owl of Minerva only begins its flight as dusk falls

The owl of Minerva is to be understood as a metaphor for philosophy or wisdom. However, the ancient Italian deity Minerva was equated with Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, whose best-known attributes include the owl.

See also: Γλαῦκ᾿ εἰς Ἀθήνας. (Carrying owls to Athens)

The quotation expresses that knowledge is only possible from a certain distance in time. It comes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's preface to his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, published in 1821. There it says:

Hegel compared philosophy to the owl that only flies out at dusk. He is of the opinion that philosophy, too, only comes into its own when the evening of events (= history) has come. Philosophy therefore only has the possibility to analyse processes when they have passed and always comes too late with its teachings.

Often alluding to the fact that philosophers, writers and other scholars of the humanities tend to prefer the evening and night hours for reflection and debate.

Raise the flag!

These words are the beginning of the National Socialist Horst Wessel Song, a battle song of the SA that became the party anthem of the NSDAP. It is named after the SA man Horst Wessel, who wrote the lyrics between 1927 and 1929 to a melody that probably originated in the 19th century. It was printed as a poem in August 1929 by the SA organ Der Angriff with the title Die Fahne hoch! and begins with the following stanza:

After Hitler came to power in 1933, the song functioned as a second national anthem, modelled on the Italian Giovinezza. The Allied Control Council banned the song in 1945 after Germany's defeat in the Second World War. On 1 August 1968 (one year before the criminal law form), a § 86a StGB ("Use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations") was added to the German Criminal Code. In Austria, comparable provisions apply (§ 3 of the Prohibition Act 1947).

When the Nazi regime issued the slogan "guns instead of butter" (armaments instead of consumer goods), joke tellers invented "Horst Wessel butter" ("march along in spirit on our bread").

Bertolt Brecht parodied this Nazi song in his drama Schweyk during the Second World War with his Kälbermarsch:

It should also be mentioned here that the SA also had a storm song with the ambiguous title Wir sind des Führers braune Haufen. Horst Wessel himself wrote in a letter to the Hitler Youth:

The woman is silent in the congregation

In Greek, verse 14:33b-35 of Paul's 1st letter to the Corinthians reads:

This commandment of silence for women is unique in the writings of the Apostle Paul. In biblical theology and textual research, it is disputed whether the sentence is by Paul or a later insertion.

The saying is modelled on a gnome by the Greek poet Menander, in which it says:

The Latin version is better known: Mulier taceat in ecclesia.

Goethe writes in the 7th book of his Tame Xenia:

All the world's a theatre

On the Globe Theatre in London, which holds a place in theatre history mainly through performances of William Shakespeare's works, Shakespeare had a Latin saying affixed:

From Shakespeare's play As You Like It (2.7.138-9) comes the English version:

The Irish playwright Oscar Wilde made of it:

The Guard Dies and Does Not Surrender

The French General Pierre Cambronne is reported to have said at the Battle of Waterloo:

In this context, the following slogan is occasionally quoted:

But the fact is that he surrendered himself and firmly denied this saying. Nevertheless, the statue in his native city of Nantes was inscribed with the saying.

The saying probably originated with the journalist Balisson de Rougemont, who had it printed in the magazine "L'Indépendant" in 1815. In addition, General Michel's sons protested against the inscription on Cambronne's statue and claimed copyright for their father.

The Napoleonic Imperial Guard (French: Garde impériale) was the elite corps of the Grande Armée founded in 1804. It was considered almost invincible until Waterloo. Napoleon often used the Guard as a last reserve in his battles and preferred to deploy it in battle-decisive situations.

The Secret Seducers

The Secret Seducers is a non-fiction book on advertising published by the US consumer critic Vance Packard in 1957 under the original English title "The Hidden Persuaders". The subtitle "The Grip on the Subconscious in Everyone" refers to the so-called motive research. Packard criticises the persuasion to make purchasing decisions that have nothing to do with actual needs and also nothing to do with the quality of the product.

The curved road is the way of the donkeys

This sentence comes from the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who claimed in 1925:

"La rue courbe est le chemin des ânes, la rue droite le chemin des Hommes."

"The curved road is the way of the donkey, the straight road is the way of man."

Le Corbusier was concerned with the car-friendly city. Manfred Sack wrote about this quote in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in 1988:

Seizing the opportunity

This expression goes back to the Greek myth of the god Kairos (καιρός = favourable opportunity), who was depicted flying away with a curly head and a bald neck, because one seeks to seize the good opportunity only when it has disappeared. The god of the favourable moment is depicted in art with a bald back of the head and a shock of hair on the forehead, by which the favourable moment could be well grasped.

In Greek it means:

The saying is attributed to Pittakos of Mytilene, the commander of the Mytilene army in the battle against the Athenians. He agreed with the leader of the Athenians, Phrynon (Olympic champion in pankration), to fight only among the leaders. In hand-to-hand combat he threw a net over Phrynon and defeated or killed him; thus the battle against Athens was won without further bloodshed.

The straight line is godless

This dictum comes from the so-called Verschimmelungsmanifest (Moulding Manifesto) initiated by the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser in a speech at Seckau Abbey on 4 July 1958:

Hundertwasser sees the ruler as a symbol of the new illiteracy. He believes that in earlier times the straight line was a privilege. Today, however, "every moron owns millions of straight lines".

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier was of a different opinion, claiming:

The heroes are tired

Die Helden sind müde is the German title of a French feature film from 1954 (French: Les héros sont fatigués). The title is usually quoted derisively when people slacken in their zeal in accomplishing a task.

Hell, these are the others

In Jean-Paul Sartre's play At Closed Doors (also: Closed Company; French: Huis clos), three people who have just died find themselves in a salon that is identical to hell.

The three cannot leave the room and are thus dependent on each other. They have to realise that their personal freedom finds its limit in the demands of the other. But they cannot even kill each other, because they are already dead. The man among the three then comes to the realisation:

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on

The translation of the Turkish proverb "it ürür kervan yürür" was a saying often used by the then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. His characteristic of sitting out problems and not responding to his counterpart, which was attributed to him, was also called the "Helmut Kohl syndrome". This strategy of acting as if one does not need to react to criticism and waiting until the opponent gives up can only be afforded by those who are in a clearly stronger position.

Those I called, the spirits

Towards the end of Goethe's ballad The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the careless sorcerer's apprentice realises that the spirits he has conjured can no longer be brought under control and, unable to think of the right incantation, he moans in despair in the penultimate stanza:

The quote is used today when a development gets out of control. This is what it says in a speech by Green MP Stefan Wenzel on the subject of setting up a parliamentary committee of enquiry into the Asse mine:

The Ghosts I Called... is the German title of the US-American film comedy Scrooged (actually: "Der Geizhals").

You can't see the ones in the dark

The most popular song from Bertolt Brecht's play The Threepenny Opera is The Moritat of Mackie Messer. Especially the last verse of the film version picks up the theme of social injustice:

"... you can't see those in the dark!" was the title of a conference on poverty and health risks among children held at the Hanover Medical School in July 1998.

Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht is the title of a novel by Johannes Mario Simmel and the headline of an article about those behind a corruption scandal in Manager Magazin.

The whole direction doesn't suit us!

"The whole direction doesn't suit us!" was the answer of the Berlin police president Freiherr Bernhard von Richthofen in 1890 to the question of the theatre director Oscar Blumenthal as to why the drama "Sodom's End" by Hermann Sudermann was banned. In the play, the urban clique of the nouveau riche became the subject of a biblical story. It is a forerunner of the naturalist movement in Germany.

The Sixteenth Chapter of Memoirs of a Socialist - Apprentice Years, an autobiographical novel by Lily Braun from 1909, says of the play:

The Emperorless, the Terrible Time

This is a phrase from Friedrich Schiller's ballad Der Graf von Habsburg. There it says about the coronation of Rudolf of Habsburg, who ended the interregnum:

This politically motivated ballad by Schiller dates from 1803 at the time of the Napoleonic Wars in view of the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. When Schiller characterises the Interregnum as a terrible time, this concept stems from a 19th-century view of history that glorified the Staufer rule and saw the Interregnum as an age of turmoil. It is historically incorrect that Schiller refers to Rudolf of Habsburg as emperor in his ballad, as at the beginning of the third stanza: Und der Kaiser ergrifift den goldnen Pokal Rudolf of Habsburg was never crowned emperor by the Pope, but remained Roman-German king after the election of the king until his death.

M. Barack published a rhymed list of the German emperors and rulers from Charlemagne to Wilhelm II in 1885 with a supplement in 1888 under the title: Die Deutschen Kaiser (The German Emperors), in which he took up Schiller's quotation from Rudolf von Habsburg:

The culture of a people is based on the consumption of soap

This phrase, meant quite seriously, was widespread in the second half of the 19th century. It is a variation of an idea formulated by the German chemist Justus von Liebig in his "Chemical Letters" published in 1844:

Art goes to bread

In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's tragedy Emilia Galotti, these words are the painter Conti's answer to Prince Hettore's question about what art is all about. Lessing thus uses a proverb that is already attested to in the 16th century. The quote is used today to suggest that art and commerce are inseparable.

The director Hellmuth Matiasek said in 2004 in his laudation for 30 years of Paul-Klinger-Künstlersozialwerk:

The situation has never been so serious

Rudolf Augstein said in an interview about the Spiegel affair and its consequences about the then already 86-year-old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer:

Adenauer's saying also recurs in several book titles:

• Erhard Kortmann and Fritz Wolf: The situation has never been so serious. Konrad Adenauer's winged words
• Karl Hoche: The situation has never been so serious. A history of the Federal Republic in its satire

The Last Days of Mankind

The Last Days of Mankind is the title of Karl Kraus' tragedy about the horrors of the First World War, depicted in 220 documentary scenes with 500 characters.

The title is used today as a quotation in connection with visions of the end of the world.

Reading the riot act

Around 760, Bishop Chrodegang of Metz established a rule of life for the improvement of the feral clergy, which obliged the clergy to assemble before the bishop or his deputy after morning worship; the bishop read them a chapter of the Bible, especially from the 3rd Book of Moses, Leviticus, which contains religious laws for priests and Levites, and often attached exhortations to it.

A number of special laws and regulations apply to the Levites, who still exist today as a separate group in religious Judaism. Among other things, the Levites were responsible for keeping the rules in the 3rd Book of Moses.

• The 26th chapter of the 3rd book of Moses

The love of gypsies comes from

This cliché comes from the song with which the main character introduces himself in the opera Carmen.

Gisela Blau writes about this cliché under the heading Between 'Carmen' and Auschwitz:

In 1920, the film Die Liebe vom Zigeuner stammt.... filmed.

People like to believe what they wish

This insight was written in Latin by the Roman general Gaius Iulius Caesar in his account of the Gallic War:

The Greek version of this sentence is as follows:

The murderers are among us

The Murderers Are Among Us is the first German feature film in post-war history and the first German rubble film. The film is set in 1945 in bombed-out Berlin.

The story is about a former captain who had more than one hundred Polish civilians shot on Christmas Eve 1942. In the meantime, he has become a popular citizen and successful businessman who produces cooking pots from old steel helmets.

The director Wolfgang Staudte did not only deal with the German past, but also with his own, as he was involved in the production of the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß.

The title is usually quoted when it comes to coming to terms with crimes committed during the National Socialist era:

• "The Murderers Are Among Us. The Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial 1958" (exhibition)
• "The murderers are among us!" (nationwide day of action)
• "You can't look away: the murderers are among us."

The seagulls all look like they were named Emma

This is the much quoted beginning of a poem from the Galgenlieder by Christian Morgenstern, the first stanza of which reads thus:

But Morgenstern has no intention of shooting down the seagulls:

Zibeben (from the Arabic zibiba) are sultanas dried on the vine.

In the third and last stanza Morgenstern states:

"O man, you will never
reach flight beside the
seagull.
If your name is Emma, be content to be
like her."

In an article about seagulls as "ravens of the seas", Georg Rüschemeyer writes:

"How the poet arrived at this assessment has not been handed down. But his 'Seagull Song' reflects a positive image of the elegant birds, as it apparently still prevailed at the beginning of the 20th century."

The seagulls served the sailors as messengers of the nearby mainland. The zoologist Alfred Brehm praised their intelligence and flying skills.

The upper ten thousand

In an editorial in the New York Evening Mirror newspaper of 11 November 1844, Nathaniel Parker Wittis wrote:

He chose the number 10,000 because that was the number of socially acceptable New Yorkers in his day. In England they usually just say The upper ten.

Furthermore, the concept of the "upper ten thousand" can already be found in the Old Testament. There it is said of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar after the capture of Jerusalem:

"And he carried away all Jerusalem, all the princes, and all the men of war, and ten thousand captives, and all the carpenters, and all the smiths, and left nothing but the least people of the land." (2 Kings 24:14 LUT)

The German phrase "upper ten thousand" is traced back to this passage in Luther's translation.

The film musical High Society, remake of The Night Before the Wedding, was released in German as Die oberen Zehntausend.

The party, the party is always right

This saying comes from a song of praise for the SED written by the German-speaking Czechoslovak Louis Fürnberg in 1950 under the title The Song of the Party. The refrain is as follows:

Fürnberg, a convinced communist, was not invited to the party congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1949, which deeply offended him. As his widow Lotte Fürnberg explained in 2001, he wrote the song to call himself back to order:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, but what matters is to change it

Karl Marx saw the task of philosophy in its abolition, that is, in its practical realisation.

In his eleventh Feuerbach thesis, Marx criticises all forms of idealistic philosophy and especially religion, which in his view only serves to make man's existence bearable through reveries and consolations in the afterlife, thus prolonging and legitimising misery.

Political power comes from the barrels of guns

Mao Zedong stated in his treatise "Problems of War and Strategy" in 1936:

During the Cultural Revolution, this statement was included in his "Selected Works", the so-called Mao Bible, and thus disseminated worldwide.

The police - your friend and helper

This slogan is intended to give the police a friendly image and presumably goes back to the Berlin politician Albert Grzesinski, who was Prussian Minister of the Interior from 1926 to 1930 and before that Berlin Police Commissioner. In the foreword to a book on the International Berlin Police Exhibition, which opened in September 1926, he states that the motto of the police is "to be friend, helper and comrade of the population". The slogan also served as the motto of the exhibition ("Die Polizei, dein Freund und Helfer - Bitte treten Sie näher!"), which attracted half a million visitors from Germany and abroad. In 1937, Heinrich Himmler then used it in a preface to the book "Die Polizei - einmal anders" (Franz-Eher-Verlag, Munich), by Helmuth Koschorke.

The presumed (co-)inventors are Carl Severing, who as Grzesinski's predecessor in the office of Prussian Minister of the Interior gave the opening speech, and the Berlin detective Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg.

Grzesinski turned down the post of Reichswehr Minister in 1920 because he knew the Reichswehr's esprit de corps and its effects. From November 1922 to March 1924, he served as president of the Prussian State Police Office. When this office was dissolved, he acted as Police President of Berlin from May 1925 to October 1926.

The revolution eats its own children

In Georg Büchner's drama Danton's Death, Danton says in Act 1:

The quote was based on the last words of the French lawyer and revolutionary Pierre Vergniaud shortly before his execution on 31 October 1793. He witnessed the execution of his political and personal friends, such as Brissot, Gensonné, Boyer-Fonfréde or Ducos, and was the last to be led to the scaffold. Shocked, he spoke these famous last words:

The ancient god Saturn came to power by overpowering and castrating his father. A prophecy, however, foretold that he would be deprived of power by the hand of his own son. Therefore Saturn ate all his children except his sixth son Jupiter, whom Saturn's wife Ops kept hidden on the island of Crete. She offered Saturn a stone wrapped in clothes in his place.

See also French Revolution#Erosion and End of the Reign of Terror. Further examples are given in the article Political Purge (e.g. Röhmputsch, arrest and execution of Beria, 1938-1953 head of the secret services of the Soviet Union and as such a central figure of the Stalinist terror - also against top communist officials).

In a variation of this bon mot, the historian and ex-communist Wolfgang Leonhard (1921-2014) called his best-selling book Die Revolution entläßt ihre Kinder, published in 1955.

The harshest critics of the moose used to be themselves

This well-known two-liner is attributed to the writer and cartoonist Robert Gernhardt, but was written by the caricaturist F. W. Bernstein. Both received the Göttingen Elk, an award from the city of Göttingen for "a life's work of satirical provenance and/or a satirical multiple talent". This award, in turn, is named after the above quotation.

In an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt, F. W. Bernstein when asked if he was offended by the fact that this legendary quote is often attributed to Robert Gernhardt:

The saying appeared as a Finnish proverb in a newspaper, was attributed to Bertolt Brecht and was even found on a gravestone. F. W. Bernstein saw it calmly and said:

The school of the nation is the school

This sentence from Chancellor Willy Brandt's government declaration of 28 October 1969 changes an older sentence that had been directed at the German army since the Wilhelmine era. Brandt said, among other things:

Unwinding the soul

"Let the soul dangle" goes back to the first sentence of the 6th chapter of the summer story Schloß Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky. There it literally reads:

The story deals with the first-person narrator's summer holiday with his girlfriend Lydia in Sweden. After some searching, they both end up at Gripsholm Castle, where they spend about three weeks.

The phrase derived from it, "to let the soul dangle", stands for to recuperate, to relax or to take a holiday from everyday life.

Germany's security is also defended in the Hindu Kush.

With this core statement, the then German Defence Minister Peter Struck justified the new Defence Policy Guidelines (VPR) of the Bundeswehr in May 2003. He was referring to the Afghanistan mission in the Hindu Kush mountains there.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 16 March 2008, Struck reiterated his view:

The sun brings it to light.

This sentence is the title and the reciprocal verse of a poem by Adelbert von Chamisso:

The poem tells of a murder that is solved at the end. At the end it says:

The Romans are crazy!

This expression comes from Obelix, one of the heroes in the French comic series Asterix. The Gauls, invincible thanks to their magic potion, are in constant conflict with the Romans, whose behaviour often seems incomprehensible to the simple-minded Obelix. His commentary is in French:

With this statement, Obelix provokes a scandal at the Condate theatre in the booklet Asterix and the Copper Cauldron when he is asked to simply say what is on his mind:

In the booklet Quarrel for Asterix, Obelix says about the quarrelsome villagers:

Sophisticated Asterix fans believe that the Roman signum S.P.Q.R. (Senatus Populusque Romanus) is a rendering of a modern-day Italian winged word:

Language is given to man to conceal his thoughts

When the Spanish envoy Izquiero reminded Talleyrand in 1807 of the promises he had made in favour of the Spanish King Charles IV, Talleyrand replied, paraphrasing a saying by Voltaire:

"La parole a été donnée à l'homme pour déguiser sa pensée."

In Voltaire's fable The Capon and the Fattened Chicken, the capon says:

"Les hommes ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leur injustices et n'emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées."

"Men make use of thought only to justify their injustices, and they apply words only to conceal their thoughts."

A reversal of meaning is found in Molière's play The Forced Marriage (Le mariage forcé):

"La parole a été donnée à l'homme pour expliquer sa pensée."

"Language is given to man to explain his thoughts."

The voice of his master

His Master's Voice is the brand name of various record labels.

The name and the logo go back to the painter Francis Barraud, who in 1898 had portrayed his dog Nipper listening to an Edison phonograph. The newly founded Gramophone Company bought the picture, including copyright, from him for 100 pounds to use it in newspaper advertisements. The condition, however, was that the Edison phonograph originally depicted was painted over by a Berlin gramophone.

The logo became so popular that Gramophone Records changed the name of their record label to His Master's Voice in 1909.

The grapes hang too high

This expression is also common in the form "The grapes are too sour". It is applied to someone who pretends not to want something, but in reality is unable to obtain it. The expression is based on the Aesopian fable The Fox and the Grapes. It tells the story of a fox who wants to get some grapes and, when he notices that they are hanging too high, walks away saying that the grapes are sour after all.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) is a novel by Czech author Milan Kundera, published in 1984 while he was in exile in France.

According to Kundera, the lightness of human existence is unbearable because a life flies away like dust. The central thoughts revolve around Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the "eternal return".

The book title is occasionally quoted in a modified form:

• "The unbearable lightness of wine" (Der Spiegel, 2007)
• "The unbearable ease of access" (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2007)

The past should be a springboard, not a sofa

This exhortation comes from the British publisher and politician Harold Macmillan. The phrase is often used in speeches and as a motto for schools. For example, one speech says:

Lay down your arms!

In 1889, the Austrian writer Bertha von Suttner published the novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms), with which she fought against the idea that war could be a legitimate means of resolving conflicts between states. The novel was considered the most important work of anti-war literature until the publication of Erich Maria Remarque's novel Im Westen nichts Neues in 1929.

The title has also been translated into other languages:

• "Lay Down Your Arms!" (English)
• "Abbasso le Armi!" (Italian)
• "Bas les armes!" (french)
• "Abajo las armas!" (Spanish)

Seeking the truth in the facts

Deng Xiaoping's saying is meant to illustrate his departure from Maoist phrases. It reads in Chinese:

Chinese {{c}}

Shí shì qiú shì.

The cautious introduction of free-market elements into the planned economy was initially concentrated on agriculture, and in a short time brought about a significant improvement in supply.

Ironically, this slogan comes from Mao Zedong himself. It is found in Mao's essay On Practice. Thus, in 1980, Deng Xiaoping was quoted in the Beijing Review on the fourth anniversary of Mao's death as follows:

Unhinging the world

According to an Aristotle commentary by the philosopher Simplikios, this expression goes back to a saying by the ancient natural scientist Archimedes, who said in his Sicilian Greek:

To unhinge the world today means as much as to fundamentally change everything. By the point, he means a fixed location outside the earth where he would lift the earth off its hinges by means of a pulley. Later, this sentence was seen as a reference to the laws of leverage.

The world wants to be deceived

Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools, published in 1494, states:

"the wellt the wants cheated syn"

It is often quoted in the Latin form:

"Mundus vult decipi."

Sebastian Frank's Paradoxa, published in 1533, states:

This is the basis of:

World history is not the ground of happiness

The philosopher Georg Wilhelm FriedrichHegel said in his lectures on the philosophy of history:

In world history and the rise and fall of individual states, the objective spirit becomes the general "world spirit".

The historian Leopold von Ranke wrote on the same topic:

The French state theorist Charles-Louis de Montesquieu wrote:

The Wonderful Years

Die wunderbaren Jahre is a collection of prose texts by Reiner Kunze that was published in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1976. The author, who was still living in the GDR at the time, wrote the texts around 1975 and had the manuscript secretly transmitted to the Federal Republic. The publication of the text in the West led to Kunze being expelled from the GDR Writers' Association and 15,000 copies of Kunze's children's book Der Löwe Leopold, which had already been printed in the GDR, being cancelled.

The book and the film are about the miracles that are possible between young people and about years that are devoid of these miracles because people are deprived of their youth. The title refers to a passage in Truman Capote's novel The Grass Harp:

A nostalgic song by Sportfreunde Stiller is called In all the wonderful years.

The dignity of the human being is inviolable

Article 1 of the German Basic Law contains this formulation of human dignity:

It goes on to say:

This fundamental right is to be understood as a conscious reaction to the massive disregard for human dignity by the National Socialist state.

This was the first prank

In the picture story Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch, the second prank of the two rascals is announced in the text with these words, while Widow Bolte goes into the house with her dead chickens.

The quote is used today to comment on a successful action that is seen as the beginning of further actions:

• "This was the first prank ... - Evil neighbours make the DS unsafe."
• "Alexa was just the first prank."

Thing in itself

The philosophical expression thing-in-itself is found in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, where it states:

Elsewhere Kant wrote:

Outside of philosophical terminology, one speaks of a thing in itself when the essence of a thing is to be designated.

Do ut des

This ancient Roman legal formula, which was used when concluding contracts or barter transactions, translates as:

This implies that a counter-gift or counter-service is expected. This formula is found in the main work of the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, which he published in 1625 under the title De jure belli ac pacis libri tres ("Three Books on the Law of War and Peace").

But the blessing comes from above

This quote comes from Friedrich Schiller's poem Das Lied von der Glocke:

The first stanza ends with these words.

Today, this quote is almost only used ironically, for example when a downpour comes from above.

But the conditions, they are not so

This quote comes from Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. There, the businessman Peachum, well-meaning towards the poor, states with the Bible in his hands:

Don't worry, be happy!

"Don't worry, be happy!" (in German: "Don't worry, be happy!") were the last words of the Indian guru Meher Baba before his vow of silence. He criticised people for shouting at each other and therefore remained silent for the remaining 44 years of his life from 10 July 1925. From then on, he used alphabetic tablets and hand signs to communicate.

In the 1988 hit song Don't Worry, Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin, McFerrin elaborated on Baba's last words. His song begins as follows:

Where you burn books, you end up burning people too

This quote comes from Heinrich Heine's 1821 tragedy Almansor. The play is set around 1500, a few years after the conquest of Granada, the last Islamic empire of Moorish Spain. In it, the title character, Almansor ben Abdullah, talks to Hassan, a Muslim who is desperately fighting the Christian conquerors, about the burning of the Koran ordered by the Spanish Inquisitor, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros.

The sentence is understood as a criticism of the rather symbolic book burning that took place in 1817 on the fringes of the Wartburg Festival in Eisenach. Heine wrote about the festival that "stupid things were said and done there that were worthy of the most stupid Middle Ages". However, the quotation is not least considered prophetic with regard to the book burnings of the National Socialists.

Dr Livingstone, I presume?

With this English phrase of courtesy (Dr Livingstone, I presume?), the young journalist Henry Morton Stanley addressed the Scottish missionary David Livingstone in the Tanzanian village of Ujiji, who had been thought to be missing since 1869 and whom he had been sent out to find. Livingston responded as formally as was proper among British gentlemen:

"Yes', he said, with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly."

("'Yes', he said, with a friendly smile, and luffed his hat.")

Since there were no other white men around and the two Britons had not yet been formally introduced to each other, this was the correct way to greet each other without breaking etiquette. The fact that both men observed this etiquette even in what was then considered a remote and "uncivilised" environment was seen by contemporaries as proof of European civilisation and the taken-for-granted superiority of the "white race". This contributed decisively to the fact that a greeting phrase that was banal in other contexts became a commonplace, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Livingstone expressed surprise to Stanley that he was considered missing. The two fundamentally different personalities then spent the next five months exploring together.

The Stuttgarter Zeitung wrote about Livingstone under the headline Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

Draconian punishment

The laws of Dracon have become proverbial because of their severity and harshness. Aristotle also points to this in his Politics (II, 1274b), where he states that there was nothing remarkable about them except their severity. In his Rhetoric (1400b) he quotes Herodicus, who calls them "laws of a dragon", not those of a man.

Outside the door

Draußen vor der Tür is a play by Wolfgang Borchert with the subtitle "A play that no theatre wants to play and no audience wants to see", which was first broadcast as a radio play in 1947.

A man named Beckmann returns home from war captivity in Siberia with only one kneecap, limping and freezing, and finds everything different from how he left it. He is "one of those who come home and then don't come home because there is no home for them any more. And their home is then outside the door."

Three Graces

The three Graces are daughters of Zeus and Eurynome and are called Euphrosyne ("cheerfulness"), Thalia ("blossoming happiness") and Aglaia ("radiance"). The three Graces were a popular subject of visual art.

Three times moved is as good as once burnt down

This saying is already found in Benjamin Franklin's preface to his Poor Richard's Almanac:

"I never saw a tree that had been moved many times, nor a family that had moved many times, that thrived as well as those that had their permanent place. And again, three moves are as bad as one fire."

The saying is still used today to express that something always gets broken or lost when moving. The generation that lived through the Second World War also knows the saying in a modified form: "Three times moved is like once bombed out.

Third World

The term Third World (Tiers Monde) is of French origin and became common in the 1950s to describe countries that belonged neither to the first world of industrialised countries nor to the second world of state-trading countries. Since the term soon met with rejection, it was gradually pushed back by the term One World, which was coined for various reasons.

The term Third World (from French tiers-monde) was coined by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who developed the term analogously to the Third Estate (French tiers-état) in his article Trois mondes, une planète in L'Observateur in 1952. When Frantz Fanon equated the Third World with the colonised, underdeveloped world in his 1961 paper "The Damned of the Earth" and introduced the term into international usage, it was already in common use, at least in the French-speaking world. Originally, Third World referred to the non-aligned states that called themselves the third bloc to distinguish themselves from the East-West conflict; today, however, the term is often used as a synonym for developing country.

Therefore test who binds himself eternally...

Schiller's Song of the Bell was very popular with the bourgeois idealism of the 19th century, as can be seen from the abundance of phrases adopted from it into linguistic usage. Today, however, many are often used only jokingly:

Pranksters have turned it into "Drum prüfe wer sich ewig bindet, ob sich nicht doch was besseres findet" or "Drum prüfe wer sich ewig bindet, wo sich das Standesamt befindet" or "Drum prüfe wer sich ewig bindet, ob sich auch Geld zur Scheidung finden"!
When couples who have been friends for a long time decide to get married, the short form of the saying is also changed to:

"Therefore bind him who is eternally tested."

You are Germany

Du bist Deutschland is a social marketing campaign aimed at positive thinking and a new German national feeling. It was launched by 25 media companies as part of the Partners for Innovation initiative and coordinated by Bertelsmann. The large-scale campaign was controversial. The initiator of the campaign was Gunter Thielen, Chairman and CEO of Bertelsmann AG.

The slogan was criticised and parodied by various media. For example, there is the variant "Du bist Terrorist" (You are a terrorist) by Alexander Lehmann, which is also used in a slightly modified form as an election commercial by the Pirate Party of Germany. A historical photograph from the 1930s shows a large banner under the face of Adolf Hitler with the almost literal quote: "Because you are Germany".

You are what you eat

This statement, which paraphrases Ludwig Feuerbach's famous dictum Man is what he eats, is intended to express that one can judge a person by his diet. Furthermore, the phrase is often used in the context of nutrition science, dietetics and similar fields.

Psychologist Paul Rozin considers the phrase to be a form of magical thinking and thus the "essential cause of food refusals", which he tried to prove with a corresponding study in 1987.

You are like a flower

In the cycle of 88 poems by Heinrich Heine entitled Die Heimkehr, No. 47 begins with the following words:

This love poem was set to music by Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann and Hugo Wolf.

You always remain what you are

Mephisto teaches Faust in the study scene in Goethe's Faust I that all his striving is of no use to him:

You see the waistcoat, not the heart

This is a quotation from Schein und Sein. The poems left behind by Wilhelm Busch:

This quote can also be found as a motto for an article about the difficulties managers experience during recruitment interviews and personnel selection.

Looking stupid

The expression means: to go out empty-handed, to lose out, to look stupid because of it. This expression is said to have arisen during the First World War. The word has a similar meaning: to look at the moon or to look down the tube.

Stupid fucks good

The saying alludes to the supposed libidinousness of poorly educated classes and attests to less intelligent people, especially women, better copulation or greater satisfaction of the (male) partner, combined with easier availability. The saying has been proven not to be true in various studies; in fact, the opposite is the case.

Dark Earth

In 1878, the British-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley published his account of a trip to Africa under the title Through the Dark Continent. Stanley honestly admitted to loathing the continent. Dark, in Stanley's eyes, was not only the skin colour of Africa's inhabitants.

In labelling Africa as a dark continent, the idea of the unknown was probably mixed with that of the area inhabited by dark-skinned people.

Love: Dark Continent is also the title of a book of poems by Ingeborg Bachmann. Arno Widmann wrote "Der dunkle Erdteil" ("The Dark Continent") in an article in the Berliner Zeitung about the Queen of England's first visit to London's East End proletarian district.

In the dark continent of Africa is the title of a nonsense poem by Joachim Ringelnatz, which reads as follows:

Shine by absence

"To shine by absence" (French: Briller par son absence) originally goes back to Tacitus, who in his Annals (Annales III, 76) tells how Iunia Tertia, the wife of Cassius and sister of Brutus, was buried. According to Roman custom, the pictures of relatives were carried in front of a funeral procession,

"but Cassius and Brutus shone forth precisely because their likenesses were not seen" (Latin sed praefulgebant Cassius atque Brutus eo ipso quod effigies eorum non visebantur. ).

According to Roman law, it was forbidden to show the images of murderers in public. This applied to Cassius and Brutus at this funeral, who were among the murderers of Gaius Julius Caesar.

Based on this source, Marie-Joseph Chénier (1764-1811) formulated in his tragedy "Tibére" (1811):

"Brutus et Cassius brillaient par leur absence." ("Brutus and Cassius shone by their absence.")

and thus created a colloquial expression.

A jolt must go through Germany

German President Roman Herzog said in his Berlin speech on 26 April 1997 at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin:

This "jerk" is still often quoted today, often in a satirical sense. The future Federal President Horst Köhler also referred to Herzog's "jerk" speech in his inaugural speech on 23 May 2004:

Through the woods, through the meadows

This is the beginning of the aria of the hunter boy Max from Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz, the text of which is by Johann Friedrich Kind:

He must come through this hollow alley

The quotation comes from Wilhelm Tell's monologue in Friedrich Schiller's drama of the same name, where Tell awaits the imperial bailiff Gessler to kill him:

"There is no other way to Küssnacht. - I'll finish it here. - The opportunity is favourable."

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, under the headline "You can build on these phrases", it says about this famous Schiller quote:

The Hohle Gasse is an artificially built hollow way between Küssnacht am Rigi and Immensee. Wilhelm Tell is said to have shot the Habsburg bailiff Hermann Gessler in the Hohlen Gasse in 1307.

Through my fault

These Latin words were in the Confession of Guilt of the Catholic Mass, where it says:

The formula is found for the first time in the Ordines Romani, whose author was probably Cardinal Jakob Cajetan, and has also passed into the liturgies of the Protestant Church. Before Vatican II, only the Latin version was prayed, and its use was mandatory. The prayer is part of the Prayer of the Steps, which the priest prays in turn with the altar server or the congregation before approaching the altar at the beginning of Mass.

Through the mouth of two witnesses the truth is known everywhere

This sentence is found in Goethe's drama Faust I. Mephistopheles wants to witness the death of Marthe Schwerdtlein's husband together with Faust:

Marthe.

Mephistopheles.

Mephistopheles thus takes up a passage from the Gospel of John:

"It is also written in your law that the testimony of two men is true."

The evangelist John thus points to the 5th Book of Moses, where it says:

"There shall no single witness appear against any man concerning any iniquity or sin, ... but in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall the matter stand."