Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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And we went our separate ways without having understood each other. As in this world nobody understands the other easily.
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Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?
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No limit, no definition, may restrict the range or depth of the human spirit's passage into its own secrets or the world's.
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Paternity is based anyhow only upon conviction: I am convinced, therefore, I am the father.
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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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I will say with Lorenzo de Medici that those who do not hope for another life are always dead to this one.
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Man is a simple being, and however rich, varied, and unfathomable he may be, the cycle of his situations is soon run through.
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War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.
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Every offense is avenged on earth.
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It is better to be deceived by one's friends than to deceive them.
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Our friends show us what we can do; our enemies teach us what we must do.
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The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don't understand; no wonder they come to grief.
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If your treat an individual... as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
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The people rate strength before everything.
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The arts are the salt of the earth; as salt relates to food, the arts relate to technology.
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Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art.
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If you inquire what people are like here, I must answer, "The same as everywhere."
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If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.
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And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing, doing and thinking--and these are the sum of all wisdom. . . . Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and breathing out.
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If only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.
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Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world, becoming aware of it if only within himself, and of himself self only within it. Each new subject, well observed, opens up within us a new organ of thought.
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Wine rejoices the heart of man and joy is the mother of all virtues.
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The little man is still a man.
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When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.