Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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What is the freedom of the most free? To do what is right!
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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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What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes.
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It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.
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Beautiful is greater than Good, for it includes the Good.
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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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Only law can give us freedom.
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Life is the childhood of our immortality.
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All men would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself.
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We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.
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To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants.
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What we do not understand we do not possess.
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A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.
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It is so hard that one cannot really have confidence in doctors and yet cannot do without them.
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Thou tremblest before anticipated ills, and still bemoanest what thou never losest.
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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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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.
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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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What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?
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I will be lord over myself.