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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I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.
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No prudent antagonist thinks light of his adversaries.
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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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Thank God when He lays a burden on thee, and thank Him when He takes it off.
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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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You'll never attain it unless you know the feeling.
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Nothing is more dangerous than solitude.
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Art will always be art.
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Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke.
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I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.
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Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.
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It is not enough to have knowledge; one must apply it. It is not enough to have wishes; one must also accomplish it.
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The little man is still a man.
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Only the heart without a stain knows ease.
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There are people who pay attention to the weaknesses of their friends; that is to no avail. I have always closely watched and profited from the strengths of my adversaries.
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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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The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using 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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I do not speak of what I cannot praise.
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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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He who only tastes his error will long dwell with it, will take delight in it as in a singular felicity; while he who drains it to the dregs will, if he be not crazy, find it to be what it is.
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To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.
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The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.