Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Quotes
How many years you have to keep on doing, until you know what to do and how to do!
Tell me, how do you cope so calmly With crazy youth's arrogant way? Indeed, youth would be insufferable, Had I myself not also been insufferable.
It is a misfortune to pass at once from observation to conclusion, and to regard both as of equal value; but it befalls many a student.
The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.
True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful.
Normally, people believe that, if they hear just words, that these words must lead to some thought.
Nobody, they say, is a hero to his valet. Of course; for a man must be a hero to understand a hero. The valet, I dare say, has great respect for some person of his own stamp.
The shudder of awe is humanity's highest faculty, Even though this world is forever altering its values.
If you want to get pleasure out of life, you must attach value to the world.
Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to that path which nature has marked out for him.
There is nothing in the world more pitiable than an irresolute man, oscillating between two feelings, who would willingly unite the two and who does not perceive that nothing can unite them
Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous.
Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought, thought by action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his way back to the right road.
Necessity is cruel, but it is the only test of inward strength. Every fool may live according to his own likings.
The world of reason is to be regarded as a great and immortal being, who ceaselessly works out what is necessary, and so makes himself lord also over what is accidental.
If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.
If you are convinced of a matter, you must take sides or you don't deserve to succeed.
We're really up against it, we poor women: A bachelor's a hard thing to convert
And I like those authors best whose scenes describe my own situation in life-- and the friends who are about me whose stories touch me with interest, from resembling my own homely existence.
Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it is securely founded; that it be successfully executed.
When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.
Children, love one another, and if that is not possible-at least try to put up with one another.
A genuine work of art usually displeases at first sight, as it suggests a deficiency in the spectator.
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.
To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence - - this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden.
We can stand only a certain amount of unhappiness; anything beyond that annihilates us or passes us by, leaving us apathethetic.
Who can think wise or stupid things at all that were not thought already in the past.
Of the truly creative no one is ever master; it must be left to go its own way.
Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.
To make an epoch in the world, two conditions are manifestly essential-a good head and a great inheritance.
To make a young couple love each other, it is only necessary to oppose and separate them.
Sound and sufficient reason falls, after all, to the share of but few men, and those few men exert their influence in silence.