Top 100 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Quotes
#1. How can we know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Begin at once to do your duty and immediately you will know what is inside you.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#2. If the whole world I once could see On free soil stand, with the people free Then to the moment might I say, Linger awhile ... so fair thou art.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#3. Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#4. Whatever we think out, whatever we take in hand to do, should be perfectly and finally finished, that the world, if it must alter, will only have to spoil it; we have then nothing to do but unite the severed, to recollect and restore the dismembered.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#5. Art rests on a kind of religious sense, on a deep, steadfast earnestness; and on this account it unites so readily with religion.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#7. No one knows what he is doing so long as he is acting rightly; but of what is wrong one is always conscious.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#10. Certain faults are necessary for the existence of the individual. We would resent it if old friends were to get rid of certain peculiarities.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#11. It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#14. Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason: truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#16. I always had an aversion to your apostles of freedom; each but sought for himself freedom to do what he liked.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#17. Glib tongues frill up their hash of knowledge
for mankind in polished speeches
that are no more than vaporous winds
rustling the fallen leaves in autumn.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#18. I know I can trust in my heart ... that she ... dare I, can I express heaven in a few words? That she loves me.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#22. I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#23. Some people spend the day in complaining of a headache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#26. The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#27. If a good person does you wrong, act as though you had not noticed it. If we practice and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the wholeworld will be blind and toothless.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#28. The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#31. People can only live with their equals, and not even with them; for in the long run they cannot tolerate that someone is their equal.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#32. Who can think wise or stupid things at all that were not thought already in the past.
[Ger., Wer kann was Dummes, wer was Kluges denken,
Das nicht die Vorwelt schon gedacht.]
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#34. Once I blazed across the sky, Leaving trails of flame; I fell to earth, and here I lie - Who'll help me up again? -A Shooting Star
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#41. One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#43. Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#44. Each indecision brings its own delays and days are lost lamenting over lost days. Whatever you can do or think you can do, begin it. For boldness has magic, power, and genius in it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#46. However, come, let's go, the world's turned gray And chilly, evening mists are rising, At nightfall it's indoors you want to be. 1170 But why should you stand still, astonished, staring? What can you see in the dusk to find upsetting?
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#50. The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of scepticism with faith.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#51. No matter what one says, you can recognize only those matters that are equal to you. Only rulers who possess extraordinary abilities will recognize and esteem properly extraordinary abilities in their subjects and servants.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#53. Every man must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#54. 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.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#55. By Fortune's adverse buffets overborne
To solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn,
And not in utter loneliness to live,
Myself at last did to the Devil give!
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#61. We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#63. We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#64. If we meet someone who owes us a debt of gratitude, we remember the fact at once. How often we can meet someone to whom we owe a debt of gratitude without thinking about it at all!
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#65. As a man is, so is his God; therefore God was so often an object of mockery.
[Ger., Wie einer ist, so ist sein Gott,
Darum ward Gott so oft zu Spott.]
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#68. Certain books seem to be written, not that we might learn from them, but in order that we might see how much the author knows.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#69. A person who does not know the history of the last 3,000 years wanders in the darkness of ignorance, unable to make sense of the reality around him
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#71. Let us not dream that reason can ever be popular. Passions, emotions, may be made popular; but reason remains ever the property of an elect few.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#72. I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#73. The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it.. but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#78. We learn to treasure what is above this earth; we long for revelation, which nowhere burns more purely and more beautifully than in the New Testament.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#79. Who enslaves another's manhood with weak human power alone, Lays a heavier yoke of bondage thoughtlessly upon his own.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#80. The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#87. Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#89. Forget not that the man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts in silence, and find his reward in the exercise of them, will generally find himself badly off.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#91. In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm ... in the real world all rests on perseverance.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#96. There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous ... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#98. Say what you will of fortitude, but show me the man who can patiently endure the laughter of fools when they have obtained an advantage over him. 'Tis only when their nonsense is without foundation that one can suffer it without complaint.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#100. If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
