Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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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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Thank God when he oppresses you, and again when he releases you.
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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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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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Each traveler should know what he has to see, and what properly belongs to him, on a journey.
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What we do not understand we do not possess.
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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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A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.
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To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants.
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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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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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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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Life is the childhood of our immortality.
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Thou tremblest before anticipated ills, and still bemoanest what thou never losest.
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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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Each animal is an end in itself.