Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Some of our weaknesses are born in us, others are the result of education; it is a question which of the two gives us most trouble.
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Let no one be ashamed to say yes today if yesterday he said no. Or to say no today if yesterday he said yes. For that is life. Never to have changed-what a pitiable thing of which to boast!
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Do thine own task, and be therewith content.
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Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.
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How many years must a man do nothing, before he can at all know what is to be done and how to do it!
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Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast.
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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 be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.
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Who is the happiest man? He who is alive to the merit of others, and can rejoice in their enjoyment as if it were his own.
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If you live criticizing people, you won't have time to love them.
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Someone criticized an elderly man for wooing young women. He replied that that was the only way to rejuvenation, which was, afterall, everybody's wish.
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Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.
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Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to that path which nature has marked out for him.
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He who does not see the whole world in his friends, does not deserve that the world should hear of him.
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The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.
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Thus one can observe that those who proclaim piety as their goal and purpose usually turn into hypocrites.
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The longer I live, the more it grieves me to see man, who occupies his supreme place for the very purpose of imposing his will upon nature, and freeing himself and his from an outrageous necessity--to see him taken up with some false notion, and doing just the opposite of what he wants to do; and then, because the whole bent of his mind is spoilt, bungling miserably over everything.
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I believe in God and in nature and in the triumph of good over evil.
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If thou wouldst hear what seemly is and fit, inquire of noble woman; they can tell, who in life's common usage hold their place by graceful deed and aptly chosen word.
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The coward only threatens when he is safe.
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Life is but a preparation for what there is to come.
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He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.
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He who cannot love must learn to flatter.
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There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.