Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.
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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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Words express neither objects nor ourselves.
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When two people are really happy about one another one can generally assume they are mistaken.
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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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Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth.
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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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A person places themselves on a level with the ones they praise.
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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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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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I will be lord over myself.
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There is no way to face the great advantages of another person than through love.
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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 is the freedom of the most free? To do what is right!
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Profoundness, genius, spontaneity, merit, nobility, ingenuity, voice propriety, feeling, discernment, sensibility, good taste, great tone, rightness, courtliness, vivacity, boldness, style, freshness, harmony, perfection, imagination, purity, correctness. The greatest writer of all times. God's most astonishing creation.
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All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
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A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.
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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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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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Each animal is an end in itself.