Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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O'er all the hilltopsIs quiet now,In all the treetopsHearest thouHardly a breath;The birds are asleep in the trees:Wait; soon like theseThou too shalt rest.
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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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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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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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Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.
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I hate all explanations; they who make them deceive either themselves or the other party,-generally both.
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A noble man is led by woman's gentle words.
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We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
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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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Few are open to conviction, but the majority of men are open to persuasion.
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Neither art thou the man to catch the fiend and hold him!
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All perishable is but an allegory.
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Whatever necessity lays upon thee, endure; whatever she commands, do.
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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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Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.
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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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Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.
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The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.
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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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There are two things parents should give their children roots and wings. Roots to give them bearing and a sense of belonging, but also wings to help free them from constraints and prejudices and give them other ways to travel (or rather, to fly).
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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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Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
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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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I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.