Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness, and especially for yellow-red.
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If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.
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A judge who cannot punish, in the end associates themselves with the criminal.
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Thus I reel from desire to fulfillment and in fulfillment languish for desire.
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If society gives up the right to impose the death penalty, then self-help will appear again and personal vendettas will be around the corner.
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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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People always fancy that we must become old to become wise; but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to keep ourselves as wise as we were.
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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 longer I live, the more it grieves me to see man, who occupies his supreme place for the very purpose of imposing his will upon nature, and freeing himself and his from an outrageous necessity--to see him taken up with some false notion, and doing just the opposite of what he wants to do; and then, because the whole bent of his mind is spoilt, bungling miserably over everything.
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Translators are like busy match-makers: they sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty, and extol her charms, and arouse an irresistible longing for the original.
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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.
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It is working within limits that the craftsman reveals himself.
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One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.
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Painting and tattooing the body is a return to animalism.
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For that is love's nature that it lays claim to exclusive right and that all other claims are nil.
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We're really up against it, we poor women: A bachelor's a hard thing to convert.
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Age childish makes, they say, but 'tis not true; We're only genuine children still in Age's season. [Ger., Das Alter macht nicht kindisch, wie man spricht, Es findet uns nur noch als wahre Kinder.]
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Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.
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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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Higher aims are in themselves more valuable, even if unfulfilled, than lower ones quite attained.
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Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
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The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range.
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To understand one thing well is better than understanding many things by halves.
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The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.