Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Is not the core of nature in the heart of man?
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You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.
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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.
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There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.
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Higher aims are in themselves more valuable, even if unfulfilled, than lower ones quite attained.
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The universal subjugator, the commonplace.
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When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.
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If we could do away with death, we wouldn't object; to do away with capital punishment will be more difficult. Were that to happen, we would reinstate it from time to time.
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A judge who cannot punish, in the end associates themselves with the criminal.
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Nichts ist höher schätzen als der Werth des Tages.
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A great artist... must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.
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Art will always be art.
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Words are good, but there is something better. The best cannot be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the chief matter. Action can only be only understood and represented by the spirit.
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The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range.
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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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The philosophers must station themselves in the middle.
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As long as you don't practice it, this dying and becoming, You are only a dreary guest on this dark earth.
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He who is firm and resolute in will molds the world to himself.
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When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.
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Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.
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Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.
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People of uncommon abilities generally fall into eccentricities when their sphere of life is not adequate to their abilities.
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How many years must a man do nothing, before he can at all know what is to be done and how to do it!
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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?