Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
Writing is busy idleness.
-
As our inclinations, so our opinions.
-
Great passions are incurable diseases.
-
Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.
-
This is why we may say that those who parade piety as a purpose and an aim mostly turn into hypocrites
-
Collectors are happy people.
-
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.
-
If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.
-
A good person, striving dimly, Is well aware of the right path.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.
-
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
-
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.
-
Try novelties for salesman's bait, For novelty wins everyone.
-
We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.
-
The best pleasures of this world are not quite true.
-
Was glänzt, ist für den Augenblick geboren;das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.
-
Rest not. Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.
-
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.
-
Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.
-
Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.
-
One is led astray alike by sympathy and coldness, by praise and by blame.
-
Where there is much light, the shadows are deepest. [Ger., Wo viel Licht is, ist starker Schatten.]