Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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Those that are firm in their will mold the world to themselves.
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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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Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
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He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.
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It doesn't behoove elderly persons to follow fashion in their thinking nor in the way they dress.
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Conscience is the virtue of the observers not the agents of action.
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If your treat an individual... as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
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You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
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Who longs in solitude to live, Ah! soon his wish will gain: Men hope and love, men get and give, and leave him to his pain.
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We rather confess our moral errors, faults, and crimes than our ignorance.
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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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They should be ashamed of themselves, all these sober people!
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Boldness has power, magic and genius in it.
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Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!
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It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.
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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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No limit, no definition, may restrict the range or depth of the human spirit's passage into its own secrets or the world's.
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Don't feel guilty if you don't immediately love your stepchildren as you do your own, or as much as you think you should. Everyoneneeds time to adjust to the new family, adults included. There is no such thing as an "instant parent." Actually, no concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly.
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I was oppressed with the sensations I then felt; I sunk under the weight of them.
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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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It is a great error to take oneself for more than one is, or for less than one is worth.
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Whatever we may say against collections, which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant passages.
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If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.