Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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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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The whole history of the Christian Church is a mixture of errors and violence.
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Truth is a torch, but a terrific one; therefore we all try to reach it with closed eyes, lest we should be scorched.
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Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.
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Do people conform to the instructions of us old ones? Each thinks he must know best about himself, and thus many are lost entirely.
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The art of living rightly is like all arts; it must be learned and practiced with incessant care.
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Look at a man the way he is and he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be.
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Man errs, till he has ceased to strive.
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Perseverance is a silent power that grows irresistibly greater with time.
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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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Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art.
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The bed of flowers Loosens amain, The beauteous snowdrops Droop o'er the plain. The crocus opens Its glowing bud, Like emeralds others, Others, like blood. With saucy gesture Primroses flare, And roguish violets, Hidden with care; And whatsoever There stirs and strives, The Spring's contented, If works and thrives.
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Traveling is like gambling: it is always connected with winning and losing and generally where it is least expected we receive, more or less than what we hoped for.
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The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
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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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Each one of us must carry within the proof of immortality, it cannot be given from outside of us. To be sure, everything in natureis change but behind the change there is something eternal.
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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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What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.
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Begin by instructing yourself, then you will receive instruction from others.
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The Bible grows more beautiful, as we grow in our understanding of it.
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If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.
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In all times it is only individuals that have advanced science, not the age.
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The old lose one of the greatest privileges of man, for they are no longer judged by their contemporaries.