Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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One errs as long as one strives.
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Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.
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Great passions are incurable diseases.
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Water its living strength first shows, When obstacles its course oppose.
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You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.
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I could never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.
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He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure.
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Writing is busy idleness.
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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.
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Rash combat oft immortalizes man; if he should fall, he is renowned in song; but after-ages reckon not the ceaseless tears which the forsaken woman sheds. Poets tell us not of the many nights consumed in weeping, or of the dreary days wherein her anguished soul vainly yearns to call her loved one back.
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If you miss the first buttonhole, you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat.
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We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.
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The new vulcanism is really a daring attempt to connect the present, incomprehensible world to a past, unknown one.
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He who moves not forward, goes backward.
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A useless life is an early death.
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Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.
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A person is never happy till their vague strivings has itself marked out its proper limitations.
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But when all is said, the greatest art is to limit and isolate oneself.
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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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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.
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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.
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The real scholar learns how to evolve the unknown from the known, and draws near the master.
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The best pleasures of this world are not quite true.
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The field of experience is the whole universe in all directions. Theory remains shut up within the limits of human faculties.