Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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Words express neither objects nor ourselves.
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Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.
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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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Normally, the sciences distance themselves from life and the return to it via a detour.
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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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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 of us have life; few of us have an idea of it.
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There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.
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Live dangerously and you live right.
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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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We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.
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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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Beware of a man of one book.
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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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Who can think wise or stupid things at all that were not thought already in the past.
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A person places themselves on a level with the ones they praise.
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A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.
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Gifts come from above in their own peculiar forms.
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To me the external existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work incessantly until my death, nature will give me another form of existence when the present can no longer sustain my spirit.
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The dear good people don't know how long it takes to learn to read. I've been at it eighty years, and can't say yet that I've reached the goal.
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Judge a man's character by what he finds ridiculous.
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Everything is hard before it is easy.
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There are people who make no mistakes because they never wish to do anything worth doing.