Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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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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Give me the benefit of your convictions, if you have any; but keep your doubts to yourself, for I have enough of my own.
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Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
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Stood I, O Nature! man alone in thee, Then were it worth one's while a man to be.
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One says a lot in vain, refusing;The other mainly hears the 'No.'
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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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If you want to reach the infinite, then explore every aspect of the finite.
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The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
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The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.
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A purpose you impart is no longer your own.
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Without my attempts in natural science, I should never have learned to know mankind such as it is. In nothing else can we so closely approach pure contemplation and thought, so closely observe the errors of the senses and of the understanding, the weak and strong points of character.
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Analysis and synthesis are both as necessary to the thinking spirit as inspiration and expiration to the organism.
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Oh, happy he who still hopes he can emerge from Error's boundless sea! - Faust.
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There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.
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Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.
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No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.
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To understand one thing well is better than understanding many things by halves.
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Thus I reel from desire to fulfillment and in fulfillment languish for desire.
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Cursed Mammon be, when he with treasures To restless action spurs our fate! Cursed when for soft, indulgent leisures, He lays for us the pillows straight.
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Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
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Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.
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And those whom once my song had cheered and gladdened, If still they live, rove through the world now saddened.
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The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.