Top 100 Quotes About Goethe
#2. Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it.
Walter Kirn
#3. Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#5. We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.
Oswald Spengler
#6. But people need to cling to something," Oshima says. "They have to. You're doing the same, even though you don't realize it. It's like Goethe said: Everything's a metaphor.
Haruki Murakami
#8. I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?
Susan Glaspell
#9. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10. Goethe said, "A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart." The same holds true for demons. If you look for evil, you will find it.
Jack Grisham
#11. Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as far as literary criticism is concerned, to rest.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#12. Life is a quarry, out of which we have to mod and chisel and complete character?" ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Matt Nelson
#13. The things that matter most should never be at the mercy of the things that matter least. - Goethe
Leo Babauta
#14. I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.
Gerhard Richter
#15. Because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was The pathway to wisdom lies through excess
Jack Kerouac
#16. Not like Homer would I write,
Not like Dante if I might,
Not like Shakespeare at his best,
Not like Goethe or the rest,
Like myself, however small,
Like myself, or not at all.
William Allingham
#17. Goethe, the great poet-philosopher, once wrote: "I find more and more that it is well to be on the side of the minority, since it is always the more intelligent.
Humphrey Bancroft Neill
#18. Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature ... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
Edwin Muir
#19. Goethe argued there is no color in the physical world; there are only patterns of light and dark. These patterns are a sensation produced by our very souls.
John Gage
#20. I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible.
Simon McBurney
#21. Man will return to his origins. Goethe has finally become as squiggly as the city of his fathers.
Franz Grillparzer
#22. Words of wisdom for every photographer: 'Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking'. So said Goethe.
Bill Jay
#23. Dostoevsky, like Goethe's Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him. A
Mikhail Bakhtin
#25. Like Goethe at 80, you know the futility of love and you shrug
you shrug away the warm kiss
Jack Kerouac
#26. Seize this very minute; what you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Keith Ferrazzi
#27. All is fish that comes to the literary net. Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems, I turn my adventures into bread and butter.
Louisa May Alcott
#28. To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: "the mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.
Oswald Spengler
#29. The Jews of the shtetls that Tolstoy remembered were saints ... the people I photographed were saints. So now, in 1983, I tell the world: When you learn about Goethe, don't forget to study the Holocaust, too.
Roman Vishniac
#30. I like being old, even if the names I hear are more and more unfamiliar. Maybe, to paraphrase Goethe who said that, "Youth is wasted on the young," we should add that "Age can be wasted on the aged," unless one's capacity to wonder increases.
Wolf Kahn
#31. The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past ... The writing of history liberates us from history.
Benedetto Croce
#32. Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property! Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Maggie Nelson
#33. Now you've seen a hero," he said. "And that's worth something." - Eckermann, CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE
Arturo Perez-Reverte
#34. Wolfgang von Goethe:A man can stand anything, except a succession of ordinary days.
Jacqueline Winspear
#35. Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear
And struck his finger on the place, And said
Thou ailest here, and here.
Matthew Arnold
#36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Margaret Atwood - In the end, we'll all become stories.
Puja Borker
#37. The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life
the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense
the life of Blake or of Dante
taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.
James Joyce
#38. Art is bad when 'you see the intent and get put off.' (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself.
from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Joel Carmichael
#39. For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.
Jodi Picoult
#40. I didn't ask for this role, but I'll play it. Now go do your best. Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid. Goethe said that. It's not too late for you to become a person of substance, Russell. Please get my son home safely. You know, I'm glad we spoke.
Elaine Miller
#41. The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." "We
Austin Kleon
#42. The state might say that it had taken a year to write the book, and the author might say it had taken thirty. Goethe said that every bon mot of his had cost a purse of gold. What
Upton Sinclair
#43. The only means to gain one's ends with people are force and cunning. Love also, they say; but that is to wait for sunshine, and life needs every moment. JOHANN VON GOETHE, 1749-1832
Robert Greene
#44. (Quoting Goethe
We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.
James Howe
#45. We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
George Steiner
#46. Treat others as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming." Goethe "No one needs love more than the person we find difficult to like." Mike Moore
Mike Moore
#47. You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.
Thomas Mann
#48. It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.
Katy Lederer
#49. Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day.
Paul Bourget
#50. Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Matthew Arnold
#51. For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe's.
Albert Speer
#52. If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words. - JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Doreen Virtue
#54. Neuere Poeten tun viel Wasser in die Tinte. (More recent poets put a lot of water in the ink.)
Goethe: Aus Makariens Archiv. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. III 18
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#55. The actor's realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it is known, his is the most ephemeral. At least, this is said in conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral. From the point of view of Sirius, Goethe's works in ten thousand years will be dust and his name forgotten.
Albert Camus
#56. The hand gestures of Italians are not, apparently, as clear-cut as Goethe believed. De Jorio discovered that knowing the purpose of someone's mind
Ross King
#57. Our souls are made of water, Goethe says. So too, our bodies. There is a flow within us, rising and falling, unidirectional, to the heart. there is a flow without also. We circulate. We are drawn up, and we fall back down to earth again. It's all haemodynamics.
J.M. Ledgard
#58. He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth. - GOETHE
Jostein Gaarder
#59. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now!"
W. H. Murray
#60. Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
Guy Davenport
#61. Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - frequently attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cinnamon Miles
#62. If we want to resist the powers that threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must be clear what is at stake," he said. "Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, no Lister." Freedom was a foundation for creativity.
Walter Isaacson
#63. It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H.L. Mencken
#64. I find myself agreeing with Goethe, who when told he too worked excessively, replied that he had all eternity to rest. Eternity is unavoidable, but until it embraces me, I shall keep myself fully consumed with living.
Marc Olden
#65. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants.
Plato
#66. In one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was "The pathway to wisdom lies through excess" (p. 113)
Jack Kerouac
#67. Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead. But this is the secret of Goethe's Stirb und werde, "Die and come to life." For the job of compassion in a sick society only the dead need apply.
Alan W. Watts
#69. But imagine you're a tapeworm, and then suddenly you're Goethe. It's like that.
John Scalzi
#70. If it were Hegel, I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.
Robert Anton Wilson
#71. There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
Agnes Repplier
#72. Music is the same to me as it was to Goethe - a pleasant noise. I am an eye man, not an ear man.
Fritz Lang
#73. Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair.
Robert Kennedy
#74. I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.
Henry David Thoreau
#75. Do you want to be like Goethe or any of those so-called geniuses who marry a nothing hausfrau?
Nathaniel Branden
#77. Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away. - JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
William Ury
#78. Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
Thomas Carlyle
#79. Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron 's struggle cease.
Matthew Arnold
#80. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, ... begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - GOETHE
Howard Schultz
#81. and it is only in loneliness, as Goethe says, that your perceptions put forth their flowers.
E.F. Benson
#83. Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.
Martin Filler
#84. The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.
Saul Alinsky
#85. Get in first and shape the terms. He did so in quick short sentences, his smooth tenor's voice as clear and precise as it was when he sang Goethe's tragic poem.
Ian McEwan
#86. Goethe's thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose.
Rudolf Steiner
#87. It is among uneducated women that we may look for the most confirmed gossips. Goethe tells us there is nothing more frightful than bustling ignorance.
Nicolas Chamfort
#88. The elder Geoffroy and Goethe propounded, at about the same time, their law of compensation or balancement of growth; or, as Goethe expressed it, in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economise on the other side.
Charles Darwin
#89. German Nazism could not have succeeded in establishing itself except as a result of the theoretical contributions of Fichte, Goethe and Nietzsche, coupled with the ingenious and mighty leadership of Hitler and his comrades.
Abul A'la Maududi
#90. When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.
David Whyte
#91. I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to 'hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.' I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.
Elizabeth Berg
#95. Nations could not return to their settled an independent life again without noticing that they had unconsciously adopted, and come to feel here and there previously unrecognized spiritual and intellectual needs.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#96. He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#97. We can offer up much in the large, but to make sacrifices in little things is what we are seldom equal to.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
