Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Time flies, and what is past is done.
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The older I get the more I trust in the law according to which the rose and the lily bloom.
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Mannerism always wants to be finished and doesn't enjoy the process. Genuine, truly great talent, however, finds its greatest satisfaction in the production.
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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 man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.
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Let your trouble be Light will follow dark Though the heaven falls You may hear the lark.
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He is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey nor to command in order to be something.
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Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.
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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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Superstition is rooted in a much deeper and more sensitive layer of the psyche than skepticism.
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The main thing is to have a soul that loves the truth and harbours it where he finds it. And another thing: truth requires constant repetition, because error is being preached about us all the time, and not only by isolated individuals but by the masses. In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side.
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Too rigid scruples are concealed pride.
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You'll never attain it unless you know the feeling.
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We can offer up much in the large, but to make sacrifices in little things is what we are seldom equal to.
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Art rests on a kind of religious sense, on a deep, steadfast earnestness; and on this account it unites so readily with religion.
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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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We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.
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We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.
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We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies.
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Enjoy what thou has inherited from thy sires if thou wouldn't really possess it. What we employ and use is never an oppressive burden; what the moment brings forth, that only can it profit by.
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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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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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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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Error is to truth as sleep is to waking. I have observed that one turns, as if refreshed, from error back to truth.