Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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No doubt you are right... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.
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Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination.
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One alone does not help, but rather he who unites with many at the right moment.
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If we are out of synch with ourselves, everything is out of synch for us.
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The mob has nothing to lose, everything to gain.
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Few men have imagination enough for reality.
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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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There is no remedy but love for the great superiority of others.
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For usually people resist as long as they can to dismiss the fool they harbor in their bosom, they resist to confess a major mistake or to admit a truth that makes them despair.
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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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What then is your duty? What the day demands.
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To accept good advice is but to increase one's own ability.
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He who is firm and resolute in will molds the world to himself.
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To tremble before anticipated evils is to bemoan what thou hast never lost.
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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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It is working within limits that the craftsman reveals himself.
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No sacred fane requires us to submit to insult.
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Plunge boldly into the thick of life!
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Unlimited activity, of whatever kind, must end in bankruptcy.
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I do not now begin, - I still adore Her whom I early cherish'd in my breast; Then once again with prudence dispossess'd, And to whose heart I'm driven back once more. The love of Petrarch, that all-glorious love, Was unrequited, and, alas, full sad.
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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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There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.
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We are our own aptest deceiver.
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The safest thing is always to try to convert everything that is in us and around us into action; let the others talk and argue about it as they please.