Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Nothing is more odious than the majority, for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and submissive weaklings, and a mass of men who trot after them without thinking, or knowing their own minds.
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Where there is much light, the shadows are deepest. [Ger., Wo viel Licht is, ist starker Schatten.]
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A leaf that is destined to grow large is full of grooves and wrinkles at the start. Now if one has no patience and wants it smooth offhand like a willow leaf, there is trouble ahead.
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Whatever liberates our spirit, without also giving us mastery over ourselves, is destructive.
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If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.
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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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The rabble also vent their rage in words.
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We can always redeem the man who aspires and strives.
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The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
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Ich singe, wie der Vogel singtDer in den Zweigen wohnet.
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Writing is busy idleness.
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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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God made man simple, but how he changed and got complicated is hard to say.
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Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.
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The whole history of the Christian Church is a mixture of errors and violence.
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To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.
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As our inclinations, so our opinions.
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Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.
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Care is taken that trees do not grow into the sky.
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I do not speak of what I cannot praise.
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Lose the day loitering, 'twill be the same story To-morrow, and the next more dilatory, For indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! What you can do, or think you can, begin it! Only engage, and then the mind grows heated; Begin it, and the work will be completed.
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What man does not know, Or has not thought of, Wanders in the night Through the labyrinth of the mind.
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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 a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.