Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The best pleasures of this world are not quite true.
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Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
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Plants and flowers of the commonest kind can form a pleasing diary, because nothing which calls back to us the remembrance of a happy moment can be insignificant.
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But when all is said, the greatest art is to limit and isolate oneself.
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The happy do not believe in miracles.
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Against great advantages in another, there are no means of defending ourselves except love.
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Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
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Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness, and especially for yellow-red.
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If you want to reach the infinite, then explore every aspect of the finite.
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The ground that a good man treads is hallowed.
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Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
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We can always redeem the man who aspires and strives.
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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.
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It is working within limits that the craftsman reveals himself.
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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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Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.
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Several classical sayings that one likes to repeat had quite a different meaning from the ones later times attributed to them.
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Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.
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I do not now begin, - I still adore Her whom I early cherish'd in my breast; Then once again with prudence dispossess'd, And to whose heart I'm driven back once more. The love of Petrarch, that all-glorious love, Was unrequited, and, alas, full sad.
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Art will always be art.
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Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things are little.
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There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables.
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The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.
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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.