Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.
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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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There is no way to face the great advantages of another person than through love.
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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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The Primal Plant is going be the strangest creature in the world, which Nature herself must envy me. With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on for ever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could, for they are not the shadowy phantoms of a vain imagination, but possess an inner necessity and truth. The same law will be applicable to all other living organisms.
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Nature is beneficent. I praise her and all her works. She is silent and wise. She is cunning, but for good ends. She has brought me here and will also lead me away. She may scold me, but she will not hate her work. I trust her.
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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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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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To like things like, whatever one may ail; There is certain help.
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Since you know me and my destiny only too well, you probably also know what attracts me to all unfortunate people.
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Judge a man's character by what he finds ridiculous.
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Treat a person as they are, they will remain so. Treat a person the way that person can be and is capable of being and that person will become as he or she can be and should be.
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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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Words express neither objects nor ourselves.
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Let there be truth between us.
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Thou tremblest before anticipated ills, and still bemoanest what thou never losest.
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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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Each traveler should know what he has to see, and what properly belongs to him, on a journey.
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If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.
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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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Live dangerously and you live right.
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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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Character is constructed amidst the tempests of the World.