Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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If all these devils really exist it proves there must be angels, too.
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Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?
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Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.
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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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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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He is dead in this world who has no belief in another.
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If I say to the moment: 'Stay now! You are so beautiful'!
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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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Conscience is the virtue of the observers not the agents of action.
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People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude towards the public.
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He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew.
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Wine rejoices the heart of man and joy is the mother of all virtues.
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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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All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless.
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Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.
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Just as, out of habit, one consults a run-down clock as though it were still going, so too one may look at the face of a beautiful woman as though he still loved her.
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As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.
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Secrecy has many advantages, for when you tell someone the purpose of any object right away, they often think there is nothing to it.
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As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.
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After fifteen minutes nobody looks at a rainbow.
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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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That we understand something perfectly, that we accomplish something better than anyone else around us, that is what matters.
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So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!
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From desire I plunge to its fulfilment, where I long once more for desire.