Top 180 Heinrich Heine Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Where words leave off, music begins.”

— Heinrich Heine

Featured in: Music Quotes

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

— Heinrich Heine

3. “Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet.”

— Heinrich Heine

4. “We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.”

— Heinrich Heine

5. “Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.”

— Heinrich Heine

6. “A brainiac notices everything, an ignoramus comments about everything.”

— Heinrich Heine

7. “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”

— Heinrich Heine

Featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “Freedom is a new religion, the religion of our time.”

— Heinrich Heine

9. “God will forgive me. It’s his job.”

— Heinrich Heine

10. “Silence is the essential condition of happiness.”

— Heinrich Heine

11. “You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.”

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Heinrich Heine

13. “When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on.”

— Heinrich Heine

14. “In the marvelous month of May when all the buds were bursting, then in my heart did love arise. In the marvelous month of May when all the birds were singing, then did I reveal to her my yearning and longing.”

— Heinrich Heine

15. “The more i get to know people, the more i like dogs.”

— Heinrich Heine

16. “Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.”

— Heinrich Heine

17. “Newness hath an evanescent beauty.”

— Heinrich Heine

18. “Communism possesses a language which every people can understand – its elements are hunger, envy, and death.”

— Heinrich Heine

19. “There are more fools in the world than there are people.”

— Heinrich Heine

20. “A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.”

— Heinrich Heine

21. “The deepest truth blooms only from the deepest love.”

— Heinrich Heine

22. “Lo, sleep is good, better is death – in sooth The best of all were never to be born.”

— Heinrich Heine

23. “Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.”

— Heinrich Heine

24. “Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you. Oh, what lies there are in kisses!”

— Heinrich Heine

25. “You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.”

— Heinrich Heine

26. “Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions.”

— Heinrich Heine

27. “The Bible is the great family chronicle of the Jews.”

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Heinrich Heine

29. “The sea appears all golden. Beneath the sun-lit sky.”

— Heinrich Heine

30. “Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.”

— Heinrich Heine

31. “This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end.”

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Heinrich Heine

33. “The air grows cool and darkles, The Rhine flows calmly on; The mountain summit sparkles In the light of the setting sun.”

— Heinrich Heine

34. “I do not murmur, even if my heart break.”

— Heinrich Heine

35. “Thinking of Germany in the night robs me of my sleep.”

— Heinrich Heine

36. “It is there, where they burn books, that eventually they burn people.”

— Heinrich Heine

37. “God will pardon: That’s His business.”

— Heinrich Heine

38. “No author is a man of genius to his publisher.”

— Heinrich Heine

39. “First, I thought, almost despairing, This must crush my spirit now; Yet I bore it, and am bearing- Only do not ask me how.”

— Heinrich Heine

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

40. “My heart resembles the ocean; has storm, and ebb and flow; and many a beautiful pearl lies hid in its depths below.”

— Heinrich Heine

41. “The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.”

— Heinrich Heine

42. “I bequeath all my property to my wife on the condition that she remarry immediately. Then there will be at least one man to regret my death.”

— Heinrich Heine

43. “Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.”

— Heinrich Heine

44. “Out of my great sorrows, I make little songs.”

— Heinrich Heine

45. “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.”

— Heinrich Heine

46. “What Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.”

— Heinrich Heine

47. “At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it – but I did I bear it. The question remains: how?”

— Heinrich Heine

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

48. “We know only that our entire existence is forced into new paths and disrupted, that new circumstances, new joys and new sorrows await us, and that the unknown has its uncanny attractions, alluring and at the same time anguishing.”

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Heinrich Heine

50. “God has given us speech in order that we may say pleasant things to our friends, and tell bitter truths to our enemies.”

— Heinrich Heine