Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.
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What government is the best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves. [Ger., Welche Regierung die beste sei? Diejenige die uns lehrt uns selbst zu regieren.]
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Our friends show us what we can do; our enemies teach us what we must do.
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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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Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.
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When intelligent and sensible people despise knowledge in their old age, it is only because they have asked too much of it and of themselves.
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One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
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Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
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A plant is like a self-willed man, out of whom we can obtain all which we desire, if we will only treat him his own way.
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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.
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The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.
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The aim of living is life itself.
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Nothing is more consonant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole.
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As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd.
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We don't get to know anything but what we love.
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I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
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God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.
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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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If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much.
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Nature is, after all, the only book that offers important content on every page.
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Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.
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After fifteen minutes nobody looks at a rainbow.
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Life is the childhood of our immortality.