Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
Was glänzt, ist für den Augenblick geboren;das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.
-
Do you want to live happily? Travel with two bags, one for giving, the other for receiving.
-
It matters little whether a man be mathematically or philologically or artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.
-
It is only necessary to grow old to become more charitable and even indulgent. I see no fault committed by others that I have not committed myself.
-
The real scholar learns how to evolve the unknown from the known, and draws near the master.
-
Correction does much, but encouragement does more. Encouragement after censure is as the sun after a shower.
-
He who only tastes his error will long dwell with it, will take delight in it as in a singular felicity; while he who drains it to the dregs will, if he be not crazy, find it to be what it is.
-
All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.
-
Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.
-
The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
-
We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.
-
Man must strive, and striving he must err.
-
The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.
-
Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.
-
Where the light is brightest, the shadows are deepest.
-
With little art, clear wit and sense Suggest their own delivery.
-
All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.
-
What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.
-
A noble man is led by woman's gentle words.
-
This is why we may say that those who parade piety as a purpose and an aim mostly turn into hypocrites
-
Seeking with the soul the land of the Greeks.
-
Where there is much light, the shadows are deepest. [Ger., Wo viel Licht is, ist starker Schatten.]
-
He who does not stretch himself according to the coverlet finds his feet uncovered.
-
A state of true and universal tolerance is best ensured by leaving alone the peculiarities of men and peoples.