Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.
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The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
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The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity - a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.
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A world without love would be no world.
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True observers of nature, although they may think differently, will still agree that everything that is, everything that is observable as a phenomenon, can only exhibit itself in one of two ways. It is either a primal polarity that is able to unify, or it is a primal unity that is able to divide. The operation of nature consists of splitting the united or uniting the divided; this is the eternal movement of systole and diastole of the heartbeat, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, act, and exist.
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Much there is I can stand. Most things not easy to sufferI bear with quiet resolve, just as a God commands it.Only a few things I find as repugnant as snakes and poison.These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs and garlic and Christ.
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For a strolling damsel a doubtful reputation bears.
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Yet through delivery orators succeed, I feel that I am far behind indeed.
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We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.
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It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."
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The highest cannot be spoken; it can only be acted.
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We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
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One can't dull a project better than by discussing it repeatedly.
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These auspicious aspects, which the astrologers subsequently interpreted for me, may have been the causes of my preservation.
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You are, when all is done-just what you are.
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In every artist there is a touch of audacity without which no talent is conceivable.
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Schön war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.
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Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.
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The angles even Draw strength from gazing on its glance, Though none its meaning fathom may; The world's unwither'd countenance Is bright as at creation's day.
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If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of doubts of my own.
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Wer nichts wagt, gerwinnt nichts. Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß,Wer nie die kummervollen NächteAuf seinem Bette weinend saß,Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
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We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for age brings along its own defects.
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For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.
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For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.