Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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For the nature of a women is closely allied to art.
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Yet he who grasps the moment's gift, He is the proper man.
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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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To create something you must be something.
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Nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.
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Create, artist, do not talk.
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The world remains ever the same.
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Profoundness, genius, spontaneity, merit, nobility, ingenuity, voice propriety, feeling, discernment, sensibility, good taste, great tone, rightness, courtliness, vivacity, boldness, style, freshness, harmony, perfection, imagination, purity, correctness. The greatest writer of all times. God's most astonishing creation.
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Normally, the sciences distance themselves from life and the return to it via a detour.
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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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The miller believes that all the wheat grows so that his mill keeps running.
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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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Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive.
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In politics as on a sickbed men toss from side to side in hope of lying more comfortably.
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To have more, you must first be more.
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Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.
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Thank God when he oppresses you, and again when he releases you.
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He is the happiest man who can see the connection between the end and the beginning of life.
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All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.
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It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.
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Nothing is worth more than this day. You cannot relive yesterday. Tomorrow is still beyond your reach.
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For what one has in black and white, One can carry home in comfort.
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Reality surpasses imagination; and we see, breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of sleep.