Goethe Quotes

Care is taken that trees do not grow into the sky.

There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.

Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.

On top of the world, or in the depths of despair.

Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds.

If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.

He who moves not forward, goes backward.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness.

Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.

The best fortune that can fall to a man is that which corrects his defects and makes up for his failings.

What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinion of its young people, those under twenty-five.

Nothing is more damaging to the truth than an old error.

It is bad governments, not bad people, who cause revolutions.

To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.

The happy do not believe in miracles.

Money lost, something lost. Honor lost, much lost. Courage lost, everything lost-better you were never born

Traveling is like gambling: it is always connected with winning and losing and generally where it is least expected we receive, more or less than what we hoped for.

To make something you have to be something.

You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.

Oh how sweet it is to hear one's own convictions from another's lips.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

Beauty is at once the ultimate principle and the highest aim of art.

I am fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and its activity will continue through eternity.

All truths are old, and all that we have to do is recognize and utter them anew.

Dispel not, the happy delusions of children.

Those who make use of devotion as a means and end generally are hypocrites.

I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strenght, happiness & misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Words express neither objects nor ourselves.

We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.

It makes no good to point the failures out without showing at the same time the remedy to address them.

A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.

Every person above the ordinary has a certain mission that they are called to fulfill.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.

All things are only transitory.

Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

Sometimes I don't understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her!

There is no outward sign of true courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation.