Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
Everything that emancipates the spirit without giving us control over ourselves is harmful.
By nothing do men show their character more than by the things they laugh at.
There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action.
The day of fortune is like a harvest day, We must be busy when the corn is ripe.
We are never further from our wishes than when we fancy we possess the object of them.
You must be master and win, or serve and lose, grieve or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.
The greatest happiness for the thinking man is to have fathomed the fathomable, and to quietly revere the unfathomable.
Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.
The true poet is called to take in the splendor of the world and for that reason will always be inclined to praise rather than to find fault.
Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world, for he knows how to introduce the former at fit place in conversation.
Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but is sure to repent of every ill-judged outlay.
Our wishes are presentiments of the abilities that lie in us, harbingers of what we will be able to accomplish.
It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth; for error lies on the surface and may be overcome; but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to everyone.
In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.
In me there are two souls, alas, and their
Division tears my life in two.
To every one Nature appears in a form of his own. She hides herself in a thousand names and terms, and is always the same.
The world of reason is to be regarded as a great and immortal being, who ceaselessly works out what is necessary, and so makes himself lord also over what is accidental.
Deny yourself! You must deny yourself!
That is the song that never ends.
We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us. Raise them the best we can, and leave them free to develop.
A man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible; otherwise he would not try to fathom it.
We live in the midst of Nature and are strangers. She speaks to us unceasingly and betrays not her secret.
Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.
Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.
The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.
Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.
Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.
Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent
Hatred is active displeasure, envy passive. We need not wonder that envy turns to soon to hatred.
Fools and wise-folk are alike harmless. It is the half-wise, and the half-foolish, who are the most dangerous.
A gardener knows, one day this young green tree
Will blossom and bear fruit in rich profusion.
