Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
The highest happiness, the purest joys of life, wear out at last.
-
I let everyone follow his own bent, that I may be free to follow mine.
-
Method will teach you to win time.
-
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
-
Nothing is good for a nation but that which arises from its own core and its own general wants, without apish imitation of another.
-
Beauty can never really understand itself.
-
Is not the core of nature in the heart of man?
-
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.
-
For that is love's nature that it lays claim to exclusive right and that all other claims are nil.
-
The day is for mistake and error, sequence of time for success and carrying out. The one who anticipates is master of the day.
-
Translators are like busy match-makers: they sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty, and extol her charms, and arouse an irresistible longing for the original.
-
He who does not see the whole world in his friends, does not deserve that the world should hear of him.
-
One never learns to understand truly anything but what one loves.
-
Very few people love others for what they are; rather, they love what they lend them, their own selves, their own idea of them.
-
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
-
Mannerism always wants to be finished and doesn't enjoy the process. Genuine, truly great talent, however, finds its greatest satisfaction in the production.
-
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.
-
What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.
-
Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?
-
Character - in things great and small - is indicated when a man (or person) pursues with sustained follow-through what he feels himself capable of doing.
-
Our virtues and view spring from one root.
-
The wealth that cannot be administered is a burden.
-
I have heard myself accused of being an opponent, an enemy of mathematics, which no one can value more highly than I, for it accomplishes the very thing whose achievement has been denied me.
-
We are our own aptest deceiver.