Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.
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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 brilliant passes, like the dew at morn; The true endures, for ages yet unborn.
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The few of understanding, vision rare, Who veiled not from the herd their hearts, but tried, Poor generous fools, to lay their feelings bare, Them have men always burnt and crucified.
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A person is never happy till their vague strivings has itself marked out its proper limitations.
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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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The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.
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Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces!Streets, say a word! Spirit of this place, are you dumb?All things are alive in your sacred wallsEternal Rome, it's only for me all is still.
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Zwey Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust.
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Piety is not an end but a means to attain by the greatest peace of mind the highest degree of culture.
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All perishable is but an allegory.
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Let us seek to fathom those things that are fathomable and reserve those things which are unfathomable for reverence in quietude.
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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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Man supposes that he directs his life and governs his actions, when his existence is irretrievably under the control of destiny.
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Nature! We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her. Variant: NATURE! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her.
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Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense.
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Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.
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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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To make an epoch in the world, two conditions are manifestly essential-a good head and a great inheritance.
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Moral epochs have their course as well as the seasons. We can no more hold them fast than we can hold sun, moon, and stars. Our faults perpetually return upon us; and herein lies the subtlest difficulty of self-knowledge.
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Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
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Whatever necessity lays upon thee, endure; whatever she commands, do.
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The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth. [Ger., Das erste und letzte, was vom Genie gefordert wird, ist Wahreits-Liebe.]
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Young Schopenhauer, a zealous and thorough-going Kantian, tried to explain that light would cease to exist along with the seeing eye. 'What!' he said, according to Schopenhauer's own report, 'looking at him with his Jove-like eyes,'-'You should rather say that you would not exist if the light could not see you?'