Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.
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The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range.
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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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Painting and tattooing the body is a return to animalism.
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Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.
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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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For usually people resist as long as they can to dismiss the fool they harbor in their bosom, they resist to confess a major mistake or to admit a truth that makes them despair.
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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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Is not the core of nature in the heart of man?
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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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I let everyone follow his own bent, that I may be free to follow mine.
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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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The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.
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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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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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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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The universal subjugator, the commonplace.
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What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
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The philosophers must station themselves in the middle.
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The greatest joy of a thinking man is to have searched the explored and to quietly revere the unexplored.
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Nichts ist höher schätzen als der Werth des Tages.
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You shall abstain, shall abstain. That is the eternal song.
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Hatred is partial, but love is still more so.
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A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.