Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity.
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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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Can a sparrow know how a stork feels?
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Higher aims are in themselves more valuable, even if unfulfilled, than lower ones quite attained.
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Such is the frailty of man that even where he makes the truest and most forcible impression in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish.
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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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If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.
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Few men have imagination enough for reality.
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Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned.
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Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence; The last result of wisdom stamps it true; He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew.
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The Evil One has left, the evil ones remain.
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When toward the Devil's Hose we tread, Woman's a thousand steps behind.
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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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To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.
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A wife is a gift bestowed upon a man to reconcile him to the loss of paradise.
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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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Superstition is part of the poetry of life.
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The use of a thing is only a part of its significance. To know anything thoroughly, to have the full command of it in all its appliances, we must study it on its own account, independently of any special application.
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Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are.
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Cursed Mammon be, when he with treasures To restless action spurs our fate! Cursed when for soft, indulgent leisures, He lays for us the pillows straight.
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The day is of infinite length for him who knows how to appreciate and use it.
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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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Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis between receiving and giving.
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There is but one poetry-true poetry.