Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The most difficult thing is what is thought to be the simplest; to really see the things which are before your eyes.
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A distracted existence leads us to no goal.
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Yes, my love, who soever lives, loses, . . . but he also wins.
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One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows.
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Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.
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Those who make use of devotion as a means and end generally are hypocrites.
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Whoever strenuously endeavors, him we can rescue.
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Man darf nur alt werden, um milder zu sein; ich sehe keinen Fehler begehen, den ich nicht auch begangen hätte.
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Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson.
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Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.
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We who didn't inherit political power nor are made to acquire riches like nothing better than that which expands and solidifies the power of the spirit.
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Our senses don't deceive us: our judgment does.
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Schön war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.
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Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.
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You will find the most pronounced hatred of other nations on the lowest cultural levels. There is, though, a level where the hatred disappears completely and where one so to speak stands above the nations and where one experiences fortune or misfortune of a neighboring country as if they had happened to one's own.
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No man learns to know his inmost nature by introspection, for he rates himself sometimes too low, and often too high, by his own measurement. Man knows himself only by comparing himself with other men; it is life that touches his genuine worth.
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We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
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We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn't begrudge his son's talent.
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Belief is not the beginning of knowledge - it is the end.
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The human mind will not be confined to any limits.
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There is nothing new on earth For a person who lives long and experiences much. In my years of youthful wandering I have seen crystallized people.
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How to please the public - that's the test, But nowadays I find I'm in a fix; I know they're not accustomed to the best, But they've all read so much they know the tricks. How can we give then something fresh and new That's serious, but entertaining too?
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A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.
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These auspicious aspects, which the astrologers subsequently interpreted for me, may have been the causes of my preservation.