Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
If you miss the first buttonhole, you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat.
-
We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.
-
Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature herself.
-
I consider him of no account who esteems himself just as the popular breath may chance to raise him.
-
Let your trouble be Light will follow dark Though the heaven falls You may hear the lark.
-
Try novelties for salesman's bait, For novelty wins everyone.
-
There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.
-
Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.
-
Investigate what is, and not what pleases.
-
Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.
-
Of the truly creative no one is ever master; it must be left to go its own way.
-
Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love.
-
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?
-
Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things are little.
-
As our inclinations, so our opinions.
-
You accuse a woman of wavering affections, but don't blame her; she is just looking for a consistent man.
-
What is predestination? Answer: God is more powerful and wiser than we are, therefore he deals with us according to his pleasure.
-
This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.
-
Never by reflection, but only by doing is self- knowledge possible to one.
-
Hatred is active displeasure, envy passive. We need not wonder that envy turns to soon to hatred.
-
The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
-
One errs as long as one strives.
-
Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it's the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The Skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.
-
The ground that a good man treads is hallowed.