Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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Conscience is the virtue of the observers not the agents of action.
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Not art and science only, but patience will be required for the work.
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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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One that does not think to highly of himself is more than he thinks.
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In art it's not the thinking that does the job, but making.
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Don't dissipate your powers; strive to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it will surely repent of every ill-judged outlay.
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We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.
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Some people spend the day in complaining of a headache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives it.
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The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinion of its young people, those under twenty-five.
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For the nature of a women is closely allied to art.
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When two people are really happy about one another one can generally assume they are mistaken.
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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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Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight.
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Continue to make the demands of the day your immediate concern, and take occasion to test the purity of your hearts and the steadfastness of your spirits. When you then take a deep breath and rise above the cares of this world and in an hour of leisure, you will surely win the proper frame of mind to face devoutly what is above us, with reverence, seeing in all events the manifestation of a higher guidance.
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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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Thank God when he oppresses you, and again when he releases you.
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On all the peaks lies peace.
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Power is neither male nor female.
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All men would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself.
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One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.
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Death is Nature's expert advice to get plenty of Life.
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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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A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.