Goethe Quotes

Rash, inexperienced youth holds itself a chosen instrument, and allows itself unbounded license.

Ah, how often I've cursed those foolish pages, That showed my youthful sufferings to everyone! If Werther had been my brother, and I'd killed him, His sad ghost could hardly have persecuted me more.

With knowledge comes more doubt.

The ground that a good man treads is hallowed.

There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.

If you have science and art, You also have religion; But if you don't have them, You better have religion.

For that is love's nature that it lays claim to exclusive right and that all other claims are nil.

Mastery is proven only in limitation, and law alone can give us freedom.

Certain faults are necessary for the existence of the individual. We would resent it if old friends were to get rid of certain peculiarities.

If one doesn't know one's own country, one doesn't have standards for foreign countries.

When married one has to get into an argument once in a while since in this way one learns about the other.

Are we not also married to conscience which we would love to get rid of often enough since it is more bothersome than a man or a woman ever could become?

One must not criticize that which is common since it remains always the same.

For usually people resist as long as they can to dismiss the fool they harbor in their bosom, they resist to confess a major mistake or to admit a truth that makes them despair.

As soon as you are in a social setting, you better take away the key to the lock of your heart and pocket it; those who leave thekey in the lock are fools.

One needs only to get old to become milder; I don't see anyone make a mistake I hadn't also made.

Even the lowliest, provided he is whole, can be happy, and in his own . way, perfect.

Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves, when our hearts tremble in their own barriers!

Character, in great and little things, means carrying through what you feel able to do.

The man who occupies the first place seldom plays the principal part.

I wait for the morning of my tears

The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.

A word spoken is a terrible thing when it suddenly utters what the heart has long allowed.

Colors are the deeds/ and sufferings of light.

One should not search for anything behind the phenomena. They themselves are the message.

When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it's alive; then they have the parts and the'be lost the whole, for the link that's missing was the living soul.

If you don't feel it, you'll never achieve it.

We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.

There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.

When she sees the leaves fall, they raise no other idea in her mind than that winter is approaching.

How many kings are governed by their ministers, how many ministers by their secretaries? Who, in such cases, is really the chief?

What a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it!

Die Zeit ist selbst ein Element. Time is itself an element.

In politics as on a sickbed men toss from side to side in hope of lying more comfortably.

Treat a person as they are, they will remain so. Treat a person the way that person can be and is capable of being and that person will become as he or she can be and should be.

God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.

The soul of the Christian religion is reverence.

Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!

The dear good people don't know how long it takes to learn to read. I've been at it eighty years, and can't say yet that I've reached the goal.

Nothing is more consonant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole.

If ever the Divine appeared on earth, it was in the person of Christ.

One never learns to understand truly anything but what one loves.

One lives but once in the world.

The greatest genius will not be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources

Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.

Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.

There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.

Whether one show one's self a man of genius in science or compose a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on.

Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.

If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.