Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The eye doesn't see any shapes, it sees only what is differentiated through light and dark or through colors.
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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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Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
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For that is love's nature that it lays claim to exclusive right and that all other claims are nil.
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The misery that oppresses you lies not in your profession but in yourself! What man in the world would not find his situation intolerable if he chooses a craft, an art, indeed any form of life, without experiencing an inner calling? Whoever is born with a talent, or to a talent, must surely find in that the most pleasing of occupations! Everything on this earth has its difficult sides! Only some inner drive - pleasure, love - can help us overcome obstacles, prepare a path, and lift as out of the narrow circle in which others tread out their anguished, miserable existences!
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Children can scarcely be fashioned to meet with our likes and our purpose. Just as God did us give them, so must we hold them and love them, nurture and teach them to fullness and leave them to be what they are.
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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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Every bird has its decoy, and every man is led and misled in his own peculiar way.
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Quite often, as life goes on, when we feel completely secure as we go on our way, we suddenly notice that we are trapped in error, that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by individuals, by objects, have dreamt up an affinity with them which immediately vanishes before our waking eye; and yet we cannot tear ourselves away, held fast by some power that seems incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, however, we become fully aware and realize that error as well as truth can move and spur us on to action.
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Nothing tells more about the character of a man than the things he makes fun of.
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Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.
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If you are convinced of a matter, you must take sides or you don't deserve to succeed.
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To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible. It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years.
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In art it's not the thinking that does the job, but making.
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What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.
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Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
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Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.
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A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
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You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
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Mystery is truth's dancing partner.
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Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.
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Energy will do anything that can be done in the world; and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two-legged animal a man without it.
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What is the universal? The single case. What is the particular? Millions of cases.
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One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists.