Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.
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Bin ich ein Gott? Mir wird so licht!
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The greatest joy of a thinking man is to have searched the explored and to quietly revere the unexplored.
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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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The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.
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You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.
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The field of experience is the whole universe in all directions. Theory remains shut up within the limits of human faculties.
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Well-mannered children could be conceived if the parents were well-mannered.
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Culture which smooth the whole world licks, Also unto the devil sticks.
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A vain man can never be utterly ruthless: he wants to win applause and therefore he accommodates himself to others.
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The Bible grows more beautiful, as we grow in our understanding of it.
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Amerika, du hast es besser-als unser Kontinent, der alte.
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Only the heart without a stain knows ease.
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Legislators and revolutionaries who promise both equality and liberty are visionaries and charlatans.
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Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.
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What sort of God would it be, who only pushed from without.
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There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.
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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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Behaviour is a mirror in which everyone shows his image.
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Man errs, till he has ceased to strive.
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Prudent and active men, who know their strength and use it with limit and circumspection, alone go far in the affairs of the world.
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Here too it’s masquerade, I find: As everywhere, the dance of mind. I grasped a lovely masked procession, And caught things from a horror show… I’d gladly settle for a false impression, If it would last a little longer, though.
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Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.
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Faith is like private capital, stored in one's own house. It is like a public savings bank or loan office, from which individuals receive assistance in their days of need; but here the creditor quietly takes his interest for himself.