Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.
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I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.
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All of us, just because we are able to talk, also believe we are able to talk about language.
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So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!
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We rather confess our moral errors, faults, and crimes than our ignorance.
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In art, the best is good enough.
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The aim of living is life itself.
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Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!
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Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.
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Wisdom is found only in truth.
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The rose is wont with pride to swell, and ever seeks to rise.
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If only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.
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The important thing is not to know more than all men, but to know more at each moment than any particular man.
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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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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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What am I then...? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity and old age all have brought me their thoughts....their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.
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Nothing tells more about the character of a man than the things he makes fun of.
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Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up.
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Give shape, artist! don't talk! Your poem be but a breath.
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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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I hate every violent overthrow, because as much is destroyed as is gained by it.
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If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much.
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If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
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The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.