Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The true poet is called to take in the splendor of the world and for that reason will always be inclined to praise rather than tofind fault.
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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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Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.
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Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.
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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.
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So dear night the half of life is, And the fairest half indeed.
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Originality provokes originality.
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No one is more of a slave than he who thinks himself free without being so.
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Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.
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The present moment is a powerful goddess.
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Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake.
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Solitude is fine when you are at peace with yourself and have something definite to do.
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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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It is a maxim of wise government to treat people not as they should be but as they actually are.
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What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.
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Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought, thought by action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his way back to the right road.
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Oblivion is full of people who allow the opinions of others to overrule their belief in themselves.
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The works of Lavoisier and his associates operated upon many of us at that time like the Sun's rising after a night of moonshine: but Chemistry is now betrothed to the Mathematics, and is in consequence grown somewhat shy of her former admirers.
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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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One should not wish anyone disagreeable conditions of life; but for him who is involved in them by chance, they are touchstones of characters and of the most decisive value to man.
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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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Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.
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Willing is not enough, we must do.
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We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.