Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.
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Character develops itself in the stream of life.
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Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.
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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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You shall abstain, shall abstain. That is the eternal song.
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Habit is the most imperious of all masters.
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Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.
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Personality is everything in art and poetry.
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You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.
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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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Stupidity is without anxiety.
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The mob has nothing to lose, everything to gain.
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When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.
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As for solitude, I cannot understand how certain people seek to lay claim to intellectual stature, nobility of soul and strength of character, yet have not the slightest feeling for seclusion; for solitude, I maintain, when joined with a quiet contemplation of nature, a serene and conscious faith in creation and the Creator, and a few vexations from outside is the only school for a mind of lofty endowment.
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Thank God when He lays a burden on thee, and thank Him when He takes it off.
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Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.
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People of uncommon abilities generally fall into eccentricities when their sphere of life is not adequate to their abilities.
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What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable.
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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 greatest difficulties lie where we are not looking for them.
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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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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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Ah! my poor brain is racked and crazed, My spirit and senses amazed!
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He who is firm and resolute in will molds the world to himself.