Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.
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Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united.
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He is the happiest man who can see the connection between the end and the beginning of life.
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I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.
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It is better for you to suffer an injustice than for the world to be without law. Therefore, let everyone submit to the law.
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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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There is strong shadow where there is much light.
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To make converts is the natural ambition of everyone.
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God made man simple, but how he changed and got complicated is hard to say.
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Yet he who grasps the moment's gift, He is the proper man.
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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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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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Wine rejoices the heart of man and joy is the mother of all virtues.
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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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Doubt grows with knowledge.
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Reality surpasses imagination; and we see, breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of sleep.
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Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?
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True happiness springs from moderation.
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Pain and pleasure, good and evil, come to us from unexpected sources. It is not there where we have gathered up our brightest hopes, that the dawn of happiness breaks. It is not there where we have glanced our eye with affright, that we find the deadliest gloom. What should this teach us? To bow to the great and only Source of light, and live humbly and with confiding resignation.
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They should be ashamed of themselves, all these sober people!
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I am part of the part that once was everything, Part of the darkness which gave birth to light… Mephistopheles, from Faust.
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Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!
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There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.