Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Most men, even the most accomplished, are of limited faculties; every one sets a value on certain qualities in himself and others: these alone he is willing to favour, these alone will he have cultivated.
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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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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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Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is moat thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy boat among miners; and so with everything else.
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The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive.
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An absent friend gives us friendly company when we are well assured of his happiness.
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Lay hold of life with both hands, whenever thou mayest seize it, it is interesting.
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Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.
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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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Power is neither male nor female.
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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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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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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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I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.
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We must be young to do great things.
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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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What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.
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We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.
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Create, artist, do not talk.
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All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.
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True happiness springs from moderation.
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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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Austere perseverance, hash and continuous... rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistible greater with time.
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What is now the foliage moving? Air is still, and hush'd the breeze, Sultriness, this fullness loving, Through the thicket, from the trees. Now the eye at once gleams brightly, See! the infant band with mirth Moves and dances nimbly, lightly, As the morning gave it birth, Flutt'ring two and two o'er earth.