Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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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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Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.
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Only the heart without a stain knows ease.
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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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The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.
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Chess is the touchstone of intellect.
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Do you want to live happily? Travel with two bags, one for giving, the other for receiving.
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We can really respect a man only if he doesn't always look out for himself.
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No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.
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Smoothly and lightly the golden seed by the furrow is covered.
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I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.
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There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.
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Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.
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The right man is the one who seizes the moment.
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The beginning of faith is the beginning of fruitfulness; but the beginning of unbelief, however glittering, is empty.
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The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it.
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Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.
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If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.
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Der thörigste von allen Irrthümern ist, wenn junge gute Köpfe glauben, ihre Originalität zu verlieren, indem sie das Wahre anerkennen, was von andern schon anerkannt worden.
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Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love.
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Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness.
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Neither art thou the man to catch the fiend and hold him!
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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.