chief inspector

Lessing

fictional police inspector in German television serial Tatort

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Notable quotes

“Denn zu einem großen Manne gehört beides: Kleinigkeiten als Kleinigkeiten, und wichtige Dinge als wichtige Dinge zu behandeln.”
— It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
“Und ein Vergnügen erwarten, ist auch ein Vergnügen.”
— To look forward to pleasure is also a pleasure.
“If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated by means of historical truths. That is: accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason. [...] That, then, is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap.”
— "On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power" (1777), in Lessing's Theological Writings, selected and translated by Henry Chadwick (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 53 and 55
“Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel.”
— As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 499
“Es ist unendlich schwer, zu wissen, wenn und wo man bleiben soll, und Tausenden für einen ist das Ziel ihres Nachdenkens die Stelle, wo sie des Nachdenkens müde geworden.”
— It is infinitely difficult to know when and where one should stop, and for all but one in thousands the goal of their thinking is the point at which they have become tired of thinking.
“Eben die Bahn, aus welcher das Geschlecht zu seiner Vollkommenheit gelangt, muß jeder einzelne Mensch (der früher, der später) erst durchlaufen haben.”
— Precisely the way on which the species reaches its perfection, every individual human being (one earlier, one later) must have traversed, too.

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.