“Bravery is good when the cause is good.”

I certainly know German colleagues in the US who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I’ve never tried that.

People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy. But they aren’t and it is one of the experiences of life.

There’s no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.

Sometimes all it took was a scene in a movie. This juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity seemed suspicious even to me.

In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled freshed, freshly washed or of freshed laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved

I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.

Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. Sometimes I thought she just bullied me. But either way, I had no choice.

I can’t say I’m thankful about being German because I sometimes experience it as a huge burden. But it is an integral part of me and I wouldn’t want to escape it. I have accepted it.

There’s this old saying that, if you aren’t particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don’t want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don’t know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I’ve never regretted it.

When we open ourselves you yourself to me and I myself to you, when we submerge you into me and I into you when we vanish into me you and into you I Then am I me and you are you.

But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive – a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breast and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?

I can’t say I’m thankful about being German because I sometimes experience it as a huge burden. But it is an integral part of me and I wouldn’t want to escape it. I have accepted it.

The more I suffer, the more I love.

I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers.

Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.

I’ve seen extreme bravery from the least likely of people. Life is about the moments when it’s all gone wrong. That’s when we define ourselves.

Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes.

Cruelty does not make a person dishonest, the same way bravery does not make a person kind.

If the impulse to daring and bravery is too fierce and violent, stay it with guidance and instruction.

Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.

We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.

We cannot change the way the world is, but by opening ourselves to the world as it is, we may find that gentleness, decency and bravery are available – not only to us, but to all human beings.

The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything.