Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Miracle is the pet child of faith.
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Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters. This is the person who is most likely to achieve what is good and lasting.
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Die Welt ist eine Glocke, die einen Riß hat: sie klappert, aber klingt nicht.
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I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.
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We must be young to do great things.
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To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.
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Gifts come from above in their own peculiar forms.
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The hardest thing is to see what's under your very eyes.
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Age merely shows what children we remain.
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Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.
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To me the external existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work incessantly until my death, nature will give me another form of existence when the present can no longer sustain my spirit.
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While man's desires and aspirations stir he cannot choose but err.
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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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Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.
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I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strenght, happiness & misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
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There are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.
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We are not all equal, nor can we be so.
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The works of Lavoisier and his associates operated upon many of us at that time like the Sun's rising after a night of moonshine: but Chemistry is now betrothed to the Mathematics, and is in consequence grown somewhat shy of her former admirers.
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Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.
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There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.
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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.
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To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants.
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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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I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.