Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
Theories usually result from the precipitate reasoning of an impatient mind which would like to be rid of phenomena and replaces them with images, concepts, indeed often with mere words.
-
The eternal feminine draws us on high.
-
Wind is the loving Wooer of waters; Wind blends together Billows all-foaming. Spirit of man, Thou art like unto water! Fortune of man, Thou art like unto wind!
-
One needs only to get old to become milder; I don't see anyone make a mistake I hadn't also made.
-
Everything factual is, in a sense, theory. The blue of the sky exhibits the basic laws of chromatics. There is no sense in looking for something behind phenomena: they are theory.
-
Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.
-
Die Welt ist so leer, wenn man nur Berge, Flüsse und Städte darin denkt, aber hie und da jemand zu wissen, der mit uns übereinstimmt, mit dem wir auch stillschweigend fortleben, das macht uns dieses Erdenrund erst zu einem bewohnten Garten.
-
Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.
-
The rainbow mirrors human aims and action. Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing Life is but light in many-hued reflection.
-
Hell begins the day that God grants you the vision to see all that you could have done, should have done, and would have done, but did not do.
-
One is never deceived; one deceives oneself.
-
All beginnings are delightful; the threshold is the place to pause.
-
The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.
-
Die Wissenschaft hilft uns vor allem, daß sie das Staunen, wozu wir von Natur berufen find.
-
Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?
-
Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.
-
So, lively brisk old fellow, don't let age get you down. White hairs or not, you can still be a lover.
-
Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten.
-
He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as Divine Law, and not as a book of a human being made for education or entertainment.
-
Die Liebe herrscht nicht, aber sie bildet; und das ist mehr!
-
To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
-
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.
-
Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.
-
It matters little whether a man be mathematically or philologically or artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.