Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.
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It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.
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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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There is no better deliverance from the world than through art, and a man can form no surer bond with it.
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You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere.
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It makes no good to point the failures out without showing at the same time the remedy to address them.
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Don't feel guilty if you don't immediately love your stepchildren as you do your own, or as much as you think you should. Everyoneneeds time to adjust to the new family, adults included. There is no such thing as an "instant parent." Actually, no concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly.
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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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If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.
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There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on how one looks at it.
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As long as you don't practice it, this dying and becoming, You are only a dreary guest on this dark earth.
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Boldness has power, magic and genius in it.
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Pain and pleasure, good and evil, come to us from unexpected sources. It is not there where we have gathered up our brightest hopes, that the dawn of happiness breaks. It is not there where we have glanced our eye with affright, that we find the deadliest gloom. What should this teach us? To bow to the great and only Source of light, and live humbly and with confiding resignation.
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We love a girl for very different qualities than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her understanding.
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Mere curiosity adds wings to every step.
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Only the soul that loves is happy.
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By nature we have no defect that could not become a strength, no strength that could not become a defect.
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Nothing is worth more than this day. You cannot relive yesterday. Tomorrow is still beyond your reach.
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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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Of all thieves, fools are the worst; they rob you of time and temper.
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Commonplaceness, the surrender to the average, that good which is not bad but still the enemy of the best - That is our besetting danger.
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Those who have no hope for a future life are already dead for the present one.
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If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well.
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A stated truth loses its grace, but a repeated error appears insipid and ridiculous.