Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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If you miss the first buttonhole, you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat.
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Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.
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Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.
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A king there was once reigning, Who had a goodly flea, Him loved he without feigning, As his own son were he!
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There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.
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New inventions can and will be made; however, nothing new can be thought of that concerns moral man. Everything has already been thought and said which at best we can express in different forms and give new expressions to.
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Try novelties for salesman's bait, For novelty wins everyone.
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It is a great pleasure to transport one's-self into the spirit of the times; to see how a wise man has thought before us, and to what a glorious height we have at last carried it.
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No prudent antagonist thinks light of his adversaries.
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So then the year is repeating its old story again. We are come once more, thank God! to its most charming chapter. The violets and the Mayflowers are as its inscriptions or vignettes. It always makes a pleasant impression on us, when we open again at these pages of the book of life.
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Bin ich ein Gott? Mir wird so licht!
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In comradeship is danger countered best.
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Rest not. Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.
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The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity - a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.
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Don't give us your doubts, gives us your certainties, for we have doubts enough of our own.
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A genuine work of art usually displeases at first sight, as it suggests a deficiency in the spectator.
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Wishes are premonitions of abilities.
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Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic.
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Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.
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Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.
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As all Nature's thousands changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Art's wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands aye in loveliness.
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There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.
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Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.
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One is led astray alike by sympathy and coldness, by praise and by blame.