Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Give shape, artist! don't talk! Your poem be but a breath.
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Let there be truth between us.
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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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Whether one show one's self a man of genius in science or compose a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on.
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It is bad governments, not bad people, who cause revolutions.
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Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up.
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Just as, out of habit, one consults a run-down clock as though it were still going, so too one may look at the face of a beautiful woman as though he still loved her.
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I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.
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It is a maxim of wise government to treat people not as they should be but as they actually are.
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Death is Nature's expert advice to get plenty of Life.
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In art, the best is good enough.
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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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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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Every solution of a problem is a new problem.
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It is equally a mistake to hold one's self too high, or to rate one's self too cheap.
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Distance... is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.
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Everything that we call Invention or Discovery in the higher sense of the word is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth, which, after a long course of silent cultivation, suddenly flashes out into fruitful knowledge.
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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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He is a man whom it is impossible to please, because he is never pleased with himself.
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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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Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.
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He who serves the public is a poor animal; he worries himself to death and no one thanks him for it.
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Yet he who grasps the moment's gift, He is the proper man.
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I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.