Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The history of mankind is his character.
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A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.
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Die Welt ist eine Glocke, die einen Riß hat: sie klappert, aber klingt nicht.
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The soul of the Christian religion is reverence.
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I believe in God and in nature and in the triumph of good over evil.
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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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I have always paid attention to the merits of my enemies, and found it an advantage.
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By seeking and blundering we learn.
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If you want a wise answer, ask a reasonable question.
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We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out discretion, and so disappears the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.
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The solution of every problem is another problem.
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Boldness has power, magic and genius in it.
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Let no one be like another, yet everyone like the highest. How is this done? Be each one perfect in himself.
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Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of nature with which she indicates how much she loves us.
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After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.
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Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.
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Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.
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What I possess I would gladly retain. Change amuses the mind, yet scarcely profits.
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If in the infinite you want to stride, Just walk in the finite to every side.
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To know where a thing is we must have found it.
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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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Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.
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Do the duty which lies nearest to thee.
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Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.