Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The flowers of life are but visionary. How many pass away and leave no trace behind! How few yield any fruit,--and the fruit itself, how rarely does it ripen! And yet there are flowers enough; and is it not strange, my friend, that we should suffer the little that does really ripen to rot, decay, and perish unenjoyed?
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Voluntary dependence is the wonderful form of existence, and how could that be possible without love?
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If you don't know foreign languages, you don't know anything about your own.
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Even dirt glitters when the sun is shining upon it.
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Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.
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Rash, inexperienced youth holds itself a chosen instrument, and allows itself unbounded license.
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One alone does not help, but rather he who unites with many at the right moment.
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Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.
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I always had an aversion to your apostles of freedom; each but sought for himself freedom to do what he liked.
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What is my life if I am no longer useful to others.
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We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies.
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To be sure, we have inherited abilities, but our development we owe to thousands of influences coming from the world around us from which we appropriate what we can and what is suitable to us.
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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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One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.
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Thou shalt abstain, Renounce, refrain.
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Too rigid scruples are concealed pride.
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The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.
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No one knows what he is doing so long as he is acting rightly; but of what is wrong one is always conscious.
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Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity.
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My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.
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A man would create another man if one did not already exist, but a woman might live an eternity without even thinking of reproducing her own sex.
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A noble soul alone can noble souls attract; And knows alone, as ye, to hold them.
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Few men have imagination enough for reality.
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No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.