Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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He who can not learn to love must flatter.
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One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
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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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Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
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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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What am I then...? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity and old age all have brought me their thoughts....their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.
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Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.
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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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We don't get to know anything but what we love.
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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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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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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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Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.
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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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After fifteen minutes nobody looks at a rainbow.
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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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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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As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd.
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The aim of living is life itself.
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Nature is, after all, the only book that offers important content on every page.
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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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Life is the childhood of our immortality.
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If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much.