Goethe Quotes
Everything that we encounter leaves traces behind. Everything contributes imperceptibly to our education
Our wishes are presentiments of the abilities that lie in us, harbingers of what we will be able to accomplish.
Old age is never honored among us, but only indulged, as childhood is; and old men lose one of the most precious rights of man,--that of being judged by their peers.
And those whom once my song had cheered and gladdened, If still they live, rove through the world now saddened.
He who has art and science also has religion, but those who do not have them better have religion.
Reality surpasses imagination; and we see, breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of sleep.
Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned.
Such is the frailty of man that even where he makes the truest and most forcible impression in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish.
Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks he can talk about language.
A man's shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.
To be sure, we have inherited abilities, but our development we owe to thousands of influences coming from the world around us from which we appropriate what we can and what is suitable to us.
Properly speaking, such work is never finished; one must declare it so when, according to time and circumstances, one has done one's best.
Nothing tells more about the character of a man than the things he makes fun of.
It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.
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.
Don't say that you want to give, but go ahead and give! You'll never catch up with a mere hope.
What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable.
Whatever liberates our spirit, without also giving us mastery over ourselves, is destructive.
The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.
Who longs in solitude to live, Ah! soon his wish will gain: Men hope and love, men get and give, and leave him to his pain.
No two men see the world exactly alike, and different temperaments will apply in different ways a principle that they both acknowledge.
Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.
The public wishes itself to be managed like a woman; one must say nothing to it except what it likes to hear.
True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and, despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine.
Truth is a torch, but a huge one, and so it is only with blinking eyes what we all of us try to get past it, in actual terror of being burnt.
Impotent hatred is the most horrible of all emotions; one should hate nobody whom one cannot destroy.
The most fortunate of men, Be he a king or commoner, is he Whose welfare is assured in his own home.
You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere
One would give generous alms if one had the eyes to see the beauty of a cupped receiving hand.
