Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Our senses don't deceive us: our judgment does.
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The brilliant passes, like the dew at morn; The true endures, for ages yet unborn.
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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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Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness.
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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.
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Whatever necessity lays upon thee, endure; whatever she commands, do.
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It is delivery that makes the orators success.
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A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him...but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.
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Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.
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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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The force of a language does not consist of rejecting what is foreign but of swallowing it.
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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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Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.
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Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.
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Mozart is a human incarnation of the divine force of creation.
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The society of women is the element of good manners.
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Look at a man the way he is and he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be.
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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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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?'
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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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Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
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All perishable is but an allegory.
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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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I consider him of no account who esteems himself just as the popular breath may chance to raise him.