Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else.
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The whole history of the Christian Church is a mixture of errors and violence.
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Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
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Water its living strength first shows, When obstacles its course oppose.
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The universal subjugator, the commonplace.
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Culture which smooth the whole world licks, Also unto the devil sticks.
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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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The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.
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It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.
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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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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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The right man is the one who seizes the moment.
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One criticizes the English for carrying their teapots wherever they go, even lugging them up Mount Etna. But doesn't every nationhave its teapot, in which, even when traveling, it brews the dried bundles of herbs brought from home?
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The flowers of life are but visionary. How many pass away and leave no trace behind! How few yield any fruit,--and the fruit itself, how rarely does it ripen! And yet there are flowers enough; and is it not strange, my friend, that we should suffer the little that does really ripen to rot, decay, and perish unenjoyed?
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We accept every person in the world as that for which he gives himself out, only he must give himself out for something. We can put up with the unpleasant more easily than we can endure the insignificant.
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Fret not over the irretrievable, but ever act as if thy life were just begun.
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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.
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My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.
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I let everyone follow his own bent, that I may be free to follow mine.
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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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The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.
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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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We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.
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A useless life is an early death.