Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
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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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We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.
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Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.
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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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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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So much has already been said about Shakespeare that there doesn't seem to be anything more to say; yet it is the quality of the spirit that it forever stimulates the spirit.
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Power is neither male nor female.
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The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.
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To have more, you must first be more.
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You can put up with everything in this world except not with a long stretch of beautiful days.
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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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On all the peaks lies peace.
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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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In art, the best is good enough.
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Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united.
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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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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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To know where a thing is we must have found it.
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Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.
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Names are but noise and smoke, Obscuring heavenly light.
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We don't get to know anything but what we love.
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Mere curiosity adds wings to every step.