Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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.
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Those that are firm in their will mold the world to themselves.
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But the valid issue is the extent to which man knows how to form and master the material at his command.
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War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.
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Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.
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Create, artist, do not talk.
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One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
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As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time with me, poets more excellent lived before me, and others will come after me. But that in my country I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colors-of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here have a consciousness of superiority to many.
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I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.
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Paternity is based anyhow only upon conviction: I am convinced, therefore, I am the father.
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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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Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
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Where I cannot be moral, my power is gone.
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Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them.
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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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For the nature of a women is closely allied to art.
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He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.
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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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All of us, just because we are able to talk, also believe we are able to talk about language.
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The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
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Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.
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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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Humans fear reason, but they ought to fear stupidity- for reason can be hard, but stupidity can be fatal.
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There is nothing more fearful than imagination without taste. [Ger., Es ist nichts furchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne Geschmack.]