Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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Everything we do has a result. But that which is right and prudent does not always lead to good, nor the contrary to what is bad.
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The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don't understand; no wonder they come to grief.
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A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.
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Tolerance should really be only a temporary attitude; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to offend.
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One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.
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The world is full of contradiction.
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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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We are not all equal, nor can we be so.
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Lay hold of life with both hands, whenever thou mayest seize it, it is interesting.
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To create something you must be something.
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The artist has a twofold relation to nature; he is at once her master and her slave.
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Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
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At the end of life thoughts hitherto impossible come to the collected mind, like good spirits which let themselves down from the shining heights of the past.
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Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves, when our hearts tremble in their own barriers!
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Our destiny often looks like a fruit-tree in winter. Who would think from its pitiable aspect that those rigid boughs, those rough twigs could next spring again be green, bloom, and even bear fruit? Yet we hope it, we know it.
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War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.
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To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible. It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years.
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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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What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.
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That is the way of youth and life in general: that we do not understand the strategy until after the campaign is over.
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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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Who is sure of their own motives can in confidence advance or retreat.
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Every offense is avenged on earth.