Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The new vulcanism is really a daring attempt to connect the present, incomprehensible world to a past, unknown one.
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Doubt can only be removed by action.
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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 art of governing is a great metier, requiring the whole man, and it is therefore not well for a ruler to have too strong tendencies for other affairs.
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I am the Spirit that denies.
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Mozart is a human incarnation of the divine force of creation.
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The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.
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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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Microscopes and telescopes really confuse our minds.
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We who didn't inherit political power nor are made to acquire riches like nothing better than that which expands and solidifies the power of the spirit.
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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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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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The brilliant passes, like the dew at morn; The true endures, for ages yet unborn.
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The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it.
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Nichts ist höher schätzen als der Werth des Tages.
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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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You accuse a woman of wavering affections, but don't blame her; she is just looking for a consistent man.
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Der umgang mit frauen ist das element guter sitten.
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Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.
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The century is advanced, but every individual begins afresh.
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Woman is mistress of the art of completely imbittering the life of the person on whom she depends.
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I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner.
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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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No man learns to know his inmost nature by introspection, for he rates himself sometimes too low, and often too high, by his own measurement. Man knows himself only by comparing himself with other men; it is life that touches his genuine worth.