Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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.
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When a wife has a good husband, it is easily seen on her face.
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Ah! my poor brain is racked and crazed, My spirit and senses amazed!
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The mob has nothing to lose, everything to gain.
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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 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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He who is firm and resolute in will molds the world to himself.
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Method will teach you to win time.
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Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.
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Self-love exaggerates our faults as well as our virtues.
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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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Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.
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Wanted: A dog that neither barks nor bites, eats broken glass and shits diamonds.
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I let everyone follow his own bent, that I may be free to follow mine.
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Forget not that the man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts in silence, and find his reward in the exercise of them, will generally find himself badly off.
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To understand one thing well is better than understanding many things by halves.
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Duration in change.
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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.
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It is working within limits that the craftsman reveals himself.
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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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No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.
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Let him who believes in immortality enjoy his happiness in silence; he has no reason to give himself airs about it.
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There is no trifling with nature; it is always true, grave, and severe; it is always in the light, and the faults and errors fall to our share. It defies incompetency, but reveals its secrets to the competent, the truthful, and the pure.
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Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.