Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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What is predestination? Answer: God is more powerful and wiser than we are, therefore he deals with us according to his pleasure.
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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.
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Doubt can only be removed by action.
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In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
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In comradeship is danger countered best.
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Enjoy what you can, endure what you must.
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Against great advantages in another, there are no means of defending ourselves except love.
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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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If a good person does you wrong, act as though you had not noticed it. If we practice and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the wholeworld will be blind and toothless.
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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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Never let a day pass without looking at some perfect work of art, hearing some great piece of music and reading, in part, some great book.
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Rejoice that you have still have a long time to live, before the thought comes to you that there is nothing more in the world to see.
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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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Happy contractedness of youth, nay, of mankind in general, that they think neither of the high nor the deep, of the true nor the false, but only of what is suited to their own conceptions.
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No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.
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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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Every man must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.
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I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.
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What is fruitful alone is true.
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Great passions are incurable diseases.
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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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That which is eternal in Woman lifts us above.
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Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love.