Top 180 Heinrich Heine Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 4

151. “Onde se queimam livros, acaba-se queimando pessoas.”

— Heinrich Heine

152. “There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.”

— Heinrich Heine

153. “And the dancing has begun now, And the Dancings whirl round gaily In the waltz’s giddy mazes, And the ground beneath them trembles.”

— Heinrich Heine

154. “Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood.”

— Heinrich Heine

155. “Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.”

— Heinrich Heine

156. “Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.”

— Heinrich Heine

157. “He that marries is like the dogs who was married to the Adriatic. He knows not what there is in that which he marries; mayhap treasures and pearls, mayhap monsters and tempests, await him.”

— Heinrich Heine

158. “From every Englishman emanates a kind of gas, the deadly choke-damp of boredom.”

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Heinrich Heine

160. “I consider it a degradation and a stain on my honor to submit to baptism in order to qualify myself for state employment in Prussia.”

— Heinrich Heine

161. “God will forgive me the foolish remarks I have made about Him just as I will forgive my opponents the foolish things they have written about me, even though they are spiritually as inferior to me as I to thee, O God!”

— Heinrich Heine

162. “The violets prattle and titter, And gaze on the stars high above.”

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Heinrich Heine

164. “Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.”

— Heinrich Heine

165. “Where books are burnt, men finish up being burnt too.”

— Heinrich Heine

166. “You should only attempt to borrow from those who have but few of this world’s goods, as their chests are not of iron, and they are, besides, anxious to appear wealthier than they really are.”

— Heinrich Heine

167. “Lyrical poetry is much the same an every age, as the songs of the nightingales in every spring-time.”

— Heinrich Heine

168. “If thou lookest on the lime-leaf, Thou a heart’s form will discover; Therefore are the lindens ever Chosen seats of each fond lover.”

— Heinrich Heine

169. “The gazelles so gentle and clever Skip lightly in frolicsome mood.”

— Heinrich Heine

170. “Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature.”

— Heinrich Heine

171. “Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.”

— Heinrich Heine

172. “Music played at weddings always reminds me of the music played for soldiers before they go into battle.”

— Heinrich Heine

173. “Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.”

— Heinrich Heine

174. “Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature’s grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.”

— Heinrich Heine

175. “There is only one writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It is Shakespeare.”

— Heinrich Heine

176. “I do not know if she was virtuous, but she was ugly, and with a woman that is half the battle.”

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Heinrich Heine

178. “He who fears to venture as far as his heart urges and his reason permits, is a coward; he who ventures further than he intended to go, is a slave.”

— Heinrich Heine

179. “In action, the English have the advantage enjoyed by free men always entitled to free discussion: of having a ready judgment on every question. We Germans, on the other hand, are always thinking. We think so much that we never form a judgment.”

— Heinrich Heine

180. “Terrible as is war, it yet displays the spiritual grandeur of man daring to defy his mightiest hereditary enemy – death.”

— Heinrich Heine

181. “So long as my heart is full of love and the heads of my fellow-men are full of folly, I shall never lack something to write about.”

— Heinrich Heine

182. “For the Greeks, beauty is truth; for the Hebrews, truth is beauty.”

— Heinrich Heine

183. “Like a great poet, nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the utmost economy of means: nothing but sun, trees, flowers, water, and love. Of course, if the latter is absent from the beholder’s heart, the whole landscape will be an unpleasing sight; then the sun is merely so many miles in diameter, and the trees provide good firewood, and the flowers are classified according to the number of their stamens, and the water is wet.”

— Heinrich Heine

184. “The ancient, tremulous woman who was sitting behind the stove opposite the big cupboard may have sat there for a quarter of a century, and her thoughts and feelings are closely interwoven with every corner of the stove and every carving on the cupboard. And the stove and cupboard are alive, for part of a human soul has entered into them.”

— Heinrich Heine

185. “He always maintained that we fear something because we recognize it as fearsome through rational inferences, and that only the reason had any power; the heart had none. While I ate well and drank well, he kept demonstrating to me the advantages of reason... In striving after the positive, the poor man had argued away all life’s splendour, all the sunbeams, all the faith and all the flowers, leaving nothing but the cold, positive grave.”

— Heinrich Heine

186. “In earlier religions the spirit of the time was expressed through the individual and confirmed by miracles. In modern religions the spirit is expressed through the many and confirmed by reason.”

— Heinrich Heine

187. “Gott wird mir verzeihen, das ist sein Beruf.”

— Heinrich Heine