Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
The whole history of the Christian Church is a mixture of errors and violence.
-
The modern age has a false sense of superiority, because of the great mass of data at its disposal. But the valid criterion of distinction is rather the extent to which man knows how to form and master the material at his command.
-
Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love.
-
Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.
-
Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.
-
What right those who govern have to govern they don't question, they just govern. Whether the people have a right to depose them that doesn't concern them. All they are concerned with is that the people will not be tempted to depose them.
-
A vain man can never be utterly ruthless: he wants to win applause and therefore he accommodates himself to others.
-
Hold your powers together for something good and let everything go that is for you without result and is not suited to you.
-
Without my attempts in natural science, I should never have learned to know mankind such as it is. In nothing else can we so closely approach pure contemplation and thought, so closely observe the errors of the senses and of the understanding, the weak and strong points of character.
-
The sea is flowing ever, The land retains it never.
-
None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
-
Toleration ought in reality to be merely a transitory mood. It must lead to recognition. To tolerate is to affront.
-
To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.
-
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
-
Several classical sayings that one likes to repeat had quite a different meaning from the ones later times attributed to them.
-
I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner.
-
Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.
-
What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
-
How many years must a man do nothing, before he can at all know what is to be done and how to do it!
-
I do not speak of what I cannot praise.
-
We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.
-
Forget not that the man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts in silence, and find his reward in the exercise of them, will generally find himself badly off.
-
Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.
-
We can always redeem the man who aspires and strives.