Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew.
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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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There is not a single outward mark of courtesy that does not have a deep moral basis.
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Life is but a preparation for what there is to come.
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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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A stated truth loses its grace, but a repeated error appears insipid and ridiculous.
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It doesn't behoove elderly persons to follow fashion in their thinking nor in the way they dress.
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Every bird has its decoy, and every man is led and misled in his own peculiar way.
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The follies of the wise man are known to himself, but hidden from the world.
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Mastery is often taken for egotism.
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A man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible; otherwise he would not try to fathom it.
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Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?
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Mere curiosity adds wings to every step.
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Presents at once? That's good. He is sure to succeed.
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Normally, people believe that, if they hear just words, that these words must lead to some thought.
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All theory, my friend, is grey, But green is life's glad golden tree.
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We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.
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I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.
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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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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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Talent develops in quiet, alone; character is sharpened in the torrent of the world.
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Humor is one of the elements of genius--admirable as an adjunct; but as soon as it becomes dominant, only a surrogate for genius.
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The loss of a much-prized treasure is only half felt when we have not regarded its tenure as secure.
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The present is a powerful deity.