Goethe Quotes
Why go further and further, Look, happiness is right here. Learn how to grab hold of luck, For luck is always there.
The most damaging prejudice consists of banning any kind of investigation of nature.
If one mistreats citizens of foreign countries, one infringes upon one's duty toward one's own subjects; for thus one exposes themto the law of retribution.
What is the universal? The single case. What is the particular? Millions of cases.
Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.
We rather confess our moral errors, faults, and crimes than our ignorance.
We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.
This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.
And step by step, along the path of life, There's nothing true but Heaven.
I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
What man does not know, Or has not thought of, Wanders in the night Through the labyrinth of the mind.
Art rests on a kind of religious sense, on a deep, steadfast earnestness; and on this account it unites so readily with religion.
Happy contractedness of youth, nay, of mankind in general, that they think neither of the high nor the deep, of the true nor the false, but only of what is suited to their own conceptions.
Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.
A state of true and universal tolerance is best ensured by leaving alone the peculiarities of men and peoples.
The important thing is not to know more than all men, but to know more at each moment than any particular man.
Let us seek to fathom those things that are fathomable and reserve those things which are unfathomable for reverence in quietude.
That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.
Enthusiasm is of the greatest value, so long as we are not carried away by it.
The soul of man is like to water; from Heaven it cometh, to Heaven it riseth And then returning to earth, forever alternating.
Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there.
Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.
Well-mannered children could be conceived if the parents were well-mannered.
No limit, no definition, may restrict the range or depth of the human spirit's passage into its own secrets or the world's.
I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.
I will say with Lorenzo de Medici that those who do not hope for another life are always dead to this one.
Most pioneers are at the mercy of doubt at the beginning, whether of their worth, of their theories, or of the whole enigmatic field in which they labour.
