Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.
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A genuine work of art usually displeases at first sight, as it suggests a deficiency in the spectator.
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You will find the most pronounced hatred of other nations on the lowest cultural levels. There is, though, a level where the hatred disappears completely and where one so to speak stands above the nations and where one experiences fortune or misfortune of a neighboring country as if they had happened to one's own.
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For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.
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One must be something to be able to do something.
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The angles even Draw strength from gazing on its glance, Though none its meaning fathom may; The world's unwither'd countenance Is bright as at creation's day.
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To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.
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To measure up to all that is demanded of him, a man must overestimate his capacities.
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The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted.
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As beauteous is the world, and many a joy Floats through its wide dominion. But, alas, When we would seize the winged good, it flies.
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In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
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Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.
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The highest cannot be spoken; it can only be acted.
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Ah, how often I've cursed those foolish pages,That showed my youthful sufferings to everyone!If Werther had been my brother, and I'd killed him,His sad ghost could hardly have persecuted me more.
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A person is never happy till their vague strivings has itself marked out its proper limitations.
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Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced.
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Zwey Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust.
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Plants and flowers of the commonest kind can form a pleasing diary, because nothing which calls back to us the remembrance of a happy moment can be insignificant.
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Those who make use of devotion as a means and end generally are hypocrites.
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Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.
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Law is mighty, mightier necessity.
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The nude is the perfect expression of freedom. Freedom to be.
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No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.
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Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.