Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
The real scholar learns how to evolve the unknown from the known, and draws near the master.
-
Piety is not an end but a means to attain by the greatest peace of mind the highest degree of culture.
-
What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.
-
The older I get the more I trust in the law according to which the rose and the lily bloom.
-
You accuse a woman of wavering affections, but don't blame her; she is just looking for a consistent man.
-
Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.
-
Writing is busy idleness.
-
There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables.
-
A good person, striving dimly, Is well aware of the right path.
-
Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.
-
Look closely at those who patronize you. Half are unfeeling, half untaught.
-
I had rather be Mercury, the smallest among seven planets, revolving round the sun, than the first among five moons revolving round Saturn.
-
Superstition belongs to the essence of mankind and takes refuge, when one thinks one has suppressed it completely, in the strangest nooks and crannies; once it is safely ensconced there, it suddenly reappears.
-
Why should we not recognize in the lightning, the thunder, and the storm wind, the approach of an overwhelming Power, and in the scent of flowers and the gently rustling zephyr the presence of a Being full of love?
-
The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.
-
This is why we may say that those who parade piety as a purpose and an aim mostly turn into hypocrites
-
The ground that a good man treads is hallowed.
-
It is the nature of grace always to fill spaces that have been empty.
-
The useful may be trusted to further itself, for many produce it and no one can do without it; but the beautiful must be specially encouraged, for few can present it, while yet all have need of it.
-
Collectors are happy people.
-
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.
-
The best pleasures of this world are not quite true.
-
We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for age brings along its own defects.
-
True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful.