Goethe Quotes

Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.

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.

If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much

You can put up with everything in this world except not with a long stretch of beautiful days.

People do not mind their faults being spread out before them, but they become impatient if called on to give them up.

Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.

The wealth that cannot be administered is a burden.

On the pinnacle of success man does not stand firm long.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Water its living strength first shows, When obstacles its course oppose.

The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range.

I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.

In the colored reflection we have Life.

We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies

What is not fully understood is not possessed.

So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!

Method will teach you to win time.

Habit is a man's sole comfort. We dislike doing without even unpleasant things to which we have become accustomed.

If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.

To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome.

I have, alas! Philosophy, Medicine, Jurisprudence too, And to my cost Theology, With ardent labor, studied through. And here I stand, with all my lore, Poor fool, no wiser than before.

Architecture is frozen music. [Ger., Die Backunst ist eine erstarrte Musik.]

Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.

A distracted existence leads us to no goal

Judge a man's character by what he finds ridiculous.

Give me the benefit of your convictions, if you have any; but keep your doubts to yourself, for I have enough of my own.

It is delivery that makes the orators success.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude. --Faust 1, lines 182-3

Take care of your body with steadfast fidelity.

The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross.

It is a great pleasure to transport one's-self into the spirit of the times; to see how a wise man has thought before us, and to what a glorious height we have at last carried it.

We should treat children as God does us, who makes us happiest when He leaves us under the influence of innocent delusions.

In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed.

The day is of infinite length for him who knows how to appreciate and use it.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

In praising or loving a child, we love and praise not that which is, but that which we hope for.

It is said that no man is a hero to his valet. That is because a hero can be recognized only by a hero.

He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

To tremble before anticipated evils is to bemoan what thou hast never lost.

Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.

It is better to be deceived by one's friends than to deceive them.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

It is in the half fools and the half wise that the greatest danger lies.

Properly speaking, such work is never finished; one must declare it so when, according to time and circumstances, one has done one's best.

Merely to breathe freely does not mean to live.

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

Hatred is active displeasure, envy passive. We need not wonder that envy turns to soon to hatred.

When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.