Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

The person who in shaky times also wavers only increases the evil, but the person of firm decision fashions the universe.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Universe
• Waves
• Fashions

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Quotes to Explore

• I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

  

  Laura Marling
  • Life
  • Country
  • Book

• Scientists didn't discover the noble gas helium - the second most common element in the universe - on Earth until 1895. And they thought it existed in minute quantities only, until miners found a huge underground cache in Kansas in 1903.

  

  Sam Kean
  • Earth
  • Universe
  • Thought

• The kitchen is where we deal with the elements of the universe. It is where we come to understand our past and ourselves.

  

  Laura Esquivel
  • Past
  • Universe
  • Understand

• Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perception of some things, which no one else has; or at least very few, if any... I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.

  

  Ada Lovelace
  • Universe
  • Focus
  • Perception

• It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

  

  H. L. Mencken
  • God
  • Universe
  • Imagination

• You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

  

  Karel Capek
  • World
  • Government
  • Universe

• You are the universe, you aren't in the universe.

  

  Eckhart Tolle
  • You
  • Universe

• When you tour with a band, you're just out there, and it's just you guys. That's your little universe. If you do a play, it's the same deal. That becomes your world, for the cast and crew.

  

  Katey Sagal
  • World
  • Universe
  • Band

• It is proportion that beautifies everything, the whole universe consists of it, and music is measured by it.

  

  Orlando Gibbons
  • Music
  • Universe
  • Everything

• I am deeply grieved by the loss of the crew of Columbia. I express my sincere condolences to the families and friends of the astronauts. I believe that their names will remain as the bright sparkling stars in the universe and will light the way for those who will follow them on the difficult roads of space exploration.

  

  Valentina Tereshkova
  • Believe
  • Friends
  • History

• Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

  

  Galileo Galilei
  • Book
  • Universe
  • Language

• The All-Wise Maker attaches hundreds of instances of wisdom to each of the beings in the palace of the universe and equips them to perform hundreds of duties. To all trees He bestows instances of wisdom to the number of its fruits and gives duties to the number of its flowers.

  

  Said Nursi
  • Universe
  • Wisdom
  • Wise

• An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.

  

  Bat for Lashes
  • Music
  • Art
  • Words

• There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham
  • Universe
  • Evil
  • Ignore

• Look out into the universe and contemplate the glory of God. Observe the stars, millions of them, twinkling in the night sky, all with a message of unity, part of the very nature of God.

  

  Sai Baba
  • God
  • Nature
  • Night

• It's lonely. That's why, in many ways, the CIA is the world's biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it's much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I'm pretty sure the agency's divorce rate is rather high.

  

  Valerie Plame
  • World
  • Why
  • High

• Negro equality! Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagougeism as this?

  

  Abraham Lincoln
  • Great
  • God
  • Long

• The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.

  

  Carl Sagan
  • Earth
  • Perfect
  • Universe

• The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

  

  Walter Benjamin
  • Time
  • History
  • Universe

• There are 15 constants- the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.- that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people

  

  Francis Collins
  • People
  • Strong
  • Universe

• Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.

  

  Salman Rushdie
  • Nothing
  • Hollywood
  • Cinema

• I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent, and I'm not your mommy; I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.

  

  Aaron Sorkin
  • People
  • Time
  • Writing

• I've been close to two or three couples, gay and straight, who have been together for 45 years.

  

  Ira Sachs
  • Together
  • Gay
  • Three

• The person who in shaky times also wavers only increases the evil, but the person of firm decision fashions the universe.

  

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Universe
  • Waves
  • Fashions