Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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If you live criticizing people, you won't have time to love them.
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As soon as you are in a social setting, you better take away the key to the lock of your heart and pocket it; those who leave thekey in the lock are fools.
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Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of beingcreated so as to understand them to some degree.
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If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.
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Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.
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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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If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost.
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Words are good, but there is something better. The best cannot be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the chief matter. Action can only be only understood and represented by the spirit.
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There is no greater consolation for mediocrity than that the genius is not immortal.
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Still this planet's soil for noble deeds grants scope abounding.
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In all things, to serve from the lowest station upwards is necessary. To restrict yourself to a trade is best. For the narrow mind, whatever he attempts is still a trade; for the higher, an art; and the highest in doing one thing does all, or, to speak less paradoxically, in the one thing which he does rightly he sees the likeness of all that is done rightly.
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We blame equally him who is too proud to put a proper value on his own merit and him who prizes too highly his spurious worth.
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Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling.
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Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.
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Fortunately, we can take in only so much misfortune; what exceeds that limit either destroys us or leaves us indifferent.
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In art, the best is good enough.
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Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.
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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.
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Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast.
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Everything perfect in its kind has to transcend its own kind, it must become something different and incomparable. In some notes the nightingale is still a bird; then it rises above its class and seems to suggest to every winged creature what singing is truly like.
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The worst is that the very hardest thinking will not bring thoughts. They must come like good children of God and cry, "Here we are." You expend effort and energy thinking hard. Then, after you have given up, they come sauntering in with their hands in their pockets. If the effort had not been made to open the door, however, who knows when they could have come.
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One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.
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To have a positive religion is not necessary. To be in harmony with yourself and the universe is what counts, and this is possible without positive and specific formulation in words.
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Nature is so perfect that the Trinity couldn't have fashioned her any more perfect. She is an organ on which our Lord plays and the devil works the bellows.