Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
What is fruitful alone is true.
-
Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.
-
No skill or art is needed to grow old; the trick is to endure it.
-
Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.
-
Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.
-
A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.
-
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.
-
A state of true and universal tolerance is best ensured by leaving alone the peculiarities of men and peoples.
-
Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.
-
We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn't begrudge his son's talent.
-
Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.
-
The older I get the more I trust in the law according to which the rose and the lily bloom.
-
With little art, clear wit and sense Suggest their own delivery.
-
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.
-
What right those who govern have to govern they don't question, they just govern. Whether the people have a right to depose them that doesn't concern them. All they are concerned with is that the people will not be tempted to depose them.
-
He who does not stretch himself according to the coverlet finds his feet uncovered.
-
Where there is much light, the shadows are deepest. [Ger., Wo viel Licht is, ist starker Schatten.]
-
Writing is busy idleness.
-
The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
-
The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.
-
Oh happy he who still can hope in our day to breathe the truth while plunged in seas of error! What we don't know is really what we need, and what we know is of no use to us whatever!
-
If you miss the first buttonhole, you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat.
-
No prudent antagonist thinks light of his adversaries.
-
We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.