Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Hypotheses are lullabies for teachers to sing their students to sleep.
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At the end of life thoughts hitherto impossible come to the collected mind, like good spirits which let themselves down from the shining heights of the past.
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What makes people happy is activity; changing evil itself into good by power, working in a God like manner.
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Don't dissipate your powers; strive to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it will surely repent of every ill-judged outlay.
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Die Welt ist eine Glocke, die einen Riß hat: sie klappert, aber klingt nicht.
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Originality provokes originality.
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Boldness has power, magic and genius in it.
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The artist has a twofold relation to nature; he is at once her master and her slave.
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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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Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?
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How can we know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Begin at once to do your duty and immediately you will know what is inside you.
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My worthy friend, gray are all theories And green alone Life's golden tree.
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Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.
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To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.
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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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A man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible; otherwise he would not try to fathom it.
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I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.
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Nothing tells more about the character of a man than the things he makes fun of.
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The rose is wont with pride to swell, and ever seeks to rise.
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A man is not little when he finds it difficult to cope with circumstances, but when circumstances overmaster him.
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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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The follies of the wise man are known to himself, but hidden from the world.
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Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
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Nature is, after all, the only book that offers important content on every page.