Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.
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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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Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous.
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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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Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.
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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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That which is eternal in Woman lifts us above.
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As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
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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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Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.
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Whatever liberates our spirit, without also giving us mastery over ourselves, is destructive.
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To measure up to all that is demanded of him, a man must overestimate his capacities.
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It is always a sign of an unproductive time when it concerns itself with petty and technical aspects [in philology], and likewiseit is a sign of an unproductive person to pursue such trifles.
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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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How marvelous, wide and broad is my Inheritance! Time is my property, my estate is time.
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There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables.
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The older I get the more I trust in the law according to which the rose and the lily bloom.
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Association with women is the basis of good manners.
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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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Against great advantages in another, there are no means of defending ourselves except love.
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The ground that a good man treads is hallowed.
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English plays, Atrocious in content, Absurd in form, Objectionable in action, Execrable English Theatre.
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Where the light is brightest, the shadows are deepest.
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Art is a mediator of the unspeakable.