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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To know where a thing is we must have found it.
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Doubt grows with knowledge.
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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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Lay hold of life with both hands, whenever thou mayest seize it, it is interesting.
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True happiness springs from moderation.
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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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It is in the half fools and the half wise that the greatest danger lies.
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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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I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strenght, happiness & misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
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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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Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.
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All theory, my friend, is grey, But green is life's glad golden tree.
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If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.
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Oral delivery aims at persuasion and making the listener believe they are converted. Few persons are capable of being convinced the majority allow themselves to be persuaded.
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When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.
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Names are but noise and smoke, Obscuring heavenly light.
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Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up.
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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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Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.
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Your messages I hear, but faith has not been given; The dearest child of Faith is Miracle.
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People should talk less and draw more. Personally, I would like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say visually.
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Everything that we call Invention or Discovery in the higher sense of the word is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth, which, after a long course of silent cultivation, suddenly flashes out into fruitful knowledge.
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Art is constitutive-the artist determines beauty. He does not take it over.