Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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One never goes further than when they do not know where they are going.
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We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out discretion, and so disappears the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.
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To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.
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All is born of water; all is sustained by water.
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The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity.
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Courage is the commitment to begin without any guarantee of success.
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If in the infinite you want to stride, Just walk in the finite to every side.
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Every man bears something within him that, if it were publicly announced, would excite feelings of aversion.
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No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.
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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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We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.
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We love a girl for very different qualities than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her understanding.
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The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
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It will be! the mass is working clearer! Conviction gathers, truer, nearer! The mystery which for Man in Nature lies We dare to test, by knowledge led; And that which she was wont to organize We crystallize, instead.
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A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher.
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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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The coward only threatens when he is safe.
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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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To accept good advice is but to increase one's own ability.
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Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap.
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Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.
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I believe in God and in nature and in the triumph of good over evil.
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Over all the mountain tops is peace.
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Enjoy what thou has inherited from thy sires if thou wouldn't really possess it. What we employ and use is never an oppressive burden; what the moment brings forth, that only can it profit by.