Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Personality is everything in art and poetry.
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Few men have imagination enough for reality.
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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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Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity.
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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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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.
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One alone does not help, but rather he who unites with many at the right moment.
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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.
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It is a misfortune to pass at once from observation to conclusion, and to regard both as of equal value; but it befalls many a student.
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The mob has nothing to lose, everything to gain.
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Rash, inexperienced youth holds itself a chosen instrument, and allows itself unbounded license.
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Age merely shows what children we remain.
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Character develops itself in the stream of life.
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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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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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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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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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One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.
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Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.
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Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.
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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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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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The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, power and grace.
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He who is firm and resolute in will molds the world to himself.