Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
-
Beautiful is greater than Good, for it includes the Good.
-
What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes.
-
Character is constructed amidst the tempests of the World.
-
To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Only law can give us freedom.
-
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.
-
What we do not understand we do not possess.
-
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
-
We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.
-
All men would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself.
-
I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.
-
It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.
-
It is so hard that one cannot really have confidence in doctors and yet cannot do without them.
-
A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.
-
All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
-
Thou tremblest before anticipated ills, and still bemoanest what thou never losest.
-
What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?
-
Each animal is an end in itself.
-
The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
-
I will be lord over myself.
-
Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.