Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Few are open to conviction, but the majority of men are open to persuasion.
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A useless life is an early death. [Ger., Ein unnutz Leben ist ein fruher Tod.]
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I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.
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Love does not rule; but it trains, and that is more.
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The best fortune that can fall to a man is that which corrects his defects and makes up for his failings.
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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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What chance gathers, she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.
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Sceptics are yet the most credulous.
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Properly speaking, such work is never finished; one must declare it so when, according to time and circumstances, one has done one's best.
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By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that theartist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.
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The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.
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A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.
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The child, offered the mother's breast, Will not in the beginning grab it; But soon it clings to it with zest. And thus at wisdom's copious breasts You'll drink each day with greater zest.
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Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done.
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To live as one likes is plebian the noble man aspires to order and law.
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The bad thing is that thinking about thought doesn't help at all; one has to have it from nature so that the good ideas appear before us like free children of God calling to us: Here we are.
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Our wishes are presentiments of the abilities that lie in us, harbingers of what we will be able to accomplish.
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To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed That can make life a garden.
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A king there was once reigning, Who had a goodly flea, Him loved he without feigning, As his own son were he!
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I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.
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What man does not know, Or has not thought of, Wanders in the night Through the labyrinth of the mind.
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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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One lives but once in the world.
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To measure up to all that is demanded of him, a man must overestimate his capacities.