Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way.
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To the world you might be one person, but to one person, you might be the world. Kindness is the golden chain by which our world is bound together.
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All Nine often used to come to me, I mean the Muses:But I ignored them: my girl was in my arms.Now I’ve left my sweetheart: and they’ve left me,And I roll my eyes, seeking a knife or rope.But Heaven is full of gods: You came to aid me:Greetings, Boredom, mother of the Muse.
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Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.
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If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.
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Nothing is so atrocious as fancy without taste.
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I love those who yearn for the impossible.
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A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.
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When the boy begins to understand that the visible point is preceded by an invisible point, that the shortest distance between two points is conceived as a straight line before it is ever drawn with pencil and paper...the fountain of all thought has been opened to him...the philosopher can reveal him nothing new, as a geometrician he has discovered the basis of all thought.
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We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
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The spirits that I summoned upI now can't rid myself of.
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One man's word is no man's word; we should quietly hear both sides.
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One can't dull a project better than by discussing it repeatedly.
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Every need whose true satisfaction is denied leads by necessity to faith.
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Like the star that shines afar, Without haste and without rest, Let each one wheel with steady sway Round the task that rules the day, And do their best.
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'I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.'
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I have learned much from disease which life could have never taught me anywhere else.
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A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
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Die Welt ist so leer, wenn man nur Berge, Flüsse und Städte darin denkt, aber hie und da jemand zu wissen, der mit uns übereinstimmt, mit dem wir auch stillschweigend fortleben, das macht uns dieses Erdenrund erst zu einem bewohnten Garten.
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The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross.
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We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.
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Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.
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Hypotheses are scaffoldings erected in front of a building and then dismantled when the building is finished. They are indispensable for the workman; but you mustn't mistake the scaffolding for the building.
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For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.