Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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The older we get the more we must limit ourselves if we wish to be active.
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I will be lord over myself.
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We are surrounded by abysses, but the greatest of all depths is in our own heart, and an irresistible leaning leads us there. Draw thyself from thyself!
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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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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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Beautiful is greater than Good, for it includes the Good.
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A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
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The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.
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Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
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When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.
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A resolution that is communicated is no longer within thy power; thy attentions become now the plaything of chance; he who would have his commands certainly carried out must take man by surprise.
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Don't judge anyone harshly until you yourself have been through his experiences.
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Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude.
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What we do not understand we do not possess.
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A lot of people do not care about your money until nearly penniless. They also do so with time.
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It is said, that no one is a hero to their butler. The reason is, that it requires a hero to recognize a hero. The butler, however, will probably know well how to estimate his equals.
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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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It is ever true that he who does nothing for others, does nothing for himself.
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Words express neither objects nor ourselves.
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I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.
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It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.
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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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Thou tremblest before anticipated ills, and still bemoanest what thou never losest.