Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
If you want to make life easy, make it hard.
-
He who does not stretch himself according to the coverlet finds his feet uncovered.
-
A purpose you impart is no longer your own.
-
Self-love exaggerates our faults as well as our virtues.
-
The universal subjugator, the commonplace.
-
Who is the happiest man? He who is alive to the merit of others, and can rejoice in their enjoyment as if it were his own.
-
A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.
-
The further one advances in experience, the closer one comes to the unfathomable; the more one learns to utilize experience, the more one recognizes that the unfathomable is of no practical value.
-
Someone criticized an elderly man for wooing young women. He replied that that was the only way to rejuvenation, which was, afterall, everybody's wish.
-
Oh, happy he who still hopes he can emerge from Error's boundless sea! - Faust.
-
No wise combatant underestimates their antagonist.
-
I have never looked at foreign countries or gone there but with the purpose of getting to know the general human qualities that are spread all over the earth in very different forms, and then to find these qualities again in my own country and to recognize and to further them.
-
Our foibles are really what make us lovable.
-
Quite often, as life goes on, when we feel completely secure as we go on our way, we suddenly notice that we are trapped in error, that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by individuals, by objects, have dreamt up an affinity with them which immediately vanishes before our waking eye; and yet we cannot tear ourselves away, held fast by some power that seems incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, however, we become fully aware and realize that error as well as truth can move and spur us on to action.
-
Mannerism is always longing to have done, and has no true enjoyment in work. A genuine, really great talent, on the other hand, has its greatest happiness in execution.
-
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.
-
The happiest man is the one who finds happiness at home.
-
I must consider more closely this cycle of good and bad days which I find coursing within myself. Passion, attachment, the urge to action, inventiveness, performance, order all alternate and keep their orbit; cheerfulness, vigor, energy, flexibility and fatigue, serenity as well as desire. Nothing disturbs the cycle for I lead a simple life, but I must still find the time and order in which I rotate.
-
If we are out of synch with ourselves, everything is out of synch for us.
-
How circumscribed is woman's destiny!
-
I always seek the good that is in people and leave the bad to Him who made mankind and knows how to round off the corners.
-
Can a sparrow know how a stork feels?
-
We cannot too soon convince ourselves how easily we may be dispensed with in the world. What important personages we imagine ourselves to be! We think that we alone are the life of the circle in which we move; in our absence, we fancy that life, existence, breath will come to a general pause, and, alas, the gap which we leave is scarcely perceptible, so quickly is it filled again; nay, it is often the place, if not of something better, at least for something more agreeable.
-
Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men.