Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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My son, whoever wishes to keep a secret, must hide from us that he possesses one. Self complaisance over the concealed destroys its concealment.
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The close and thoughtful observer more and more learns to recognize his limitations. He realizes that with the steady growth of knowledge more and more new problems keep on emerging.
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I treat my heart like a sick child and gratify its every fancy.
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I'm gazing at church and palace, ruin and column,Like a serious man making sensible use of a journey,But soon it will happen, and all will be one vast temple,Love's temple, receiving its new initiate.Though you're a whole world, Rome, still, without Love,The world isn't the world, and Rome can't be Rome.
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Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious.
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Even the lowliest, provided he is whole, can be happy, and in his own way, perfect.
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People do not mind their faults being spread out before them, but they become impatient if called on to give them up.
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There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before - you've just got to try to think it all over again.
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Ein unnütz Leben ist ein früher Tod...
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The brilliant passes, like the dew at morn; The true endures, for ages yet unborn.
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What you have inherited from your forefathers, it takes work to make it your own.
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When you see some evil you proceed to immediate action, you make an immediate attack to cure the symptom.
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People will allow their faults to be shown them; they will let themselves be punished for them; they will patiently endure many things because of them; they only become impatient when they have to lay them aside.
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The force of a language does not consist of rejecting what is foreign but of swallowing it.
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Ein echter deutscher Mann mag keinen Franzen leiden,Doch ihre Weine trinkt er gern.
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Do not hurry; do not rest.
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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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Once a man's thirty, he's already old,He is indeed as good as dead.It's best to kill him right away.
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A violet on the meadow grew, That no one saw, that no one knew, It was a modest flower. A shepherdess pass'd by that way. Light footed, pretty and so gay; That way she came, Softly warbling forth her lay.
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In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing.
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Ich bedauere die Menschen, welche von der Vergänglichkeit der Dinge viel Wesens machen und sich in Betrachtung irdischer Nichtigkeit verlieren. Sind wir ja eben deßhalb da, um das Vergängliche unvergänglich zu machen; das kann ja nur dadurch geschehen, wenn man beides zu schätzen weiß.
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Mysterious in the light of day, nature retains her veil, despite our clamours: That which she does not willingly display cannot be wrenched from her with levers, screws and hammers.
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Die Wahrheit widerspricht unserer Natur, der Irrthum nicht, und zwar aus einem sehr einfachen Grunde: die Wahrheit fordert, daß wir uns für beschränkt erkennen follen, der Irrthum schmeichelt uns. wir seien auf ein- oder die andere Weise unbegränzt.