Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up.
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If it is the greatest truth that you seek, the plants can direct you.
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Love, whose power youth feels, is not suitable for the elderly, just as little as anything that presupposes productivity. It is rare that productivity lasts through the years.
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Normally, the sciences distance themselves from life and the return to it via a detour.
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Yet he who grasps the moment's gift, He is the proper man.
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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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I hate all bungling as I do sin, but particularly bungling in politics, which leads to the misery and ruin of many thousands and millions of people.
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As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time with me, poets more excellent lived before me, and others will come after me. But that in my country I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colors-of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here have a consciousness of superiority to many.
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A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.
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It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.
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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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If you want someone to develop a specific trait, treat them as though they already had it.
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Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth.
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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.
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All understanding begins in wonder!
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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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What is the freedom of the most free? To do what is right!
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Judge a man's character by what he finds ridiculous.
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Most pioneers are at the mercy of doubt at the beginning, whether of their worth, of their theories, or of the whole enigmatic field in which they labour.
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Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united.
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Children, like dogs, have so sharp and fine a scent that they detect and hunt out everything--the bad before all the rest. They also know well enough how this or that friend stands with their parents; and as they practice no dissimulation whatever, they serve as excellent barometers by which to observe the degree of favor or disfavor at which we stand with their parents.
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True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.
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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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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.