Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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To know where a thing is we must have found it.
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The highest happiness, the purest joys of life, wear out at last.
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Those that are firm in their will mold the world to themselves.
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Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.
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The little man is still a man.
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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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Your messages I hear, but faith has not been given; The dearest child of Faith is Miracle.
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It is a maxim of wise government to treat people not as they should be but as they actually are.
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Names are but noise and smoke, Obscuring heavenly light.
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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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Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.
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No one can take from us the joy of the first becoming aware of something, the so-called discovery. But if we also demand the honor, it can be utterly spoiled for us, for we are usually not the first. What does discovery mean, and who can say that he has discovered this or that? After all it's pure idiocy to brag about priority; for it's simply unconscious conceit, not to admit frankly that one is a plagiarist.
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He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.
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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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To quit smoking, you must first want to quit, but then you must also do the quitting.
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Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
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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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Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight.
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Who can think wise or stupid things at all that were not thought already in the past.
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Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.
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Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up.
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It is ever true that he who does nothing for others, does nothing for himself.
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I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.