Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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For what one has in black and white, One can carry home in comfort.
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Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.
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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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Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.
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Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.
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All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.
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Names are but noise and smoke, Obscuring heavenly light.
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There is no patriotic art.
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The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.
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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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So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!
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Whether one show one's self a man of genius in science or compose a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on.
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Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!
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Boldness has power, magic and genius in it.
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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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There are two things parents should give their children roots and wings. Roots to give them bearing and a sense of belonging, but also wings to help free them from constraints and prejudices and give them other ways to travel (or rather, to fly).
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If each one does their duty as an individual and if each one works in their own proper vocation, it will be right with the whole.
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Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.
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Love, whose power youth feels, is not suitable for the elderly, just as little as anything that presupposes productivity. It is rare that productivity lasts through the years.
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If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.
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What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
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I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.
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To like things like, whatever one may ail; There is certain help.
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In art, the best is good enough.