Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Quotes

Association with women is the basis of good manners.

Everything in science depends on what one calls an aperçu, on becoming aware of what is at the bottom of the phenomena. Such becoming aware is infinitely fertile.

Normally, the sciences distance themselves from life and the return to it via a detour.

And we went our separate ways without having understood each other. As in this world nobody understands the other easily.

Love, whose power youth feels, is not suitable for the elderly, just as little as anything that presupposes productivity. It is rare that productivity lasts through the years.

There is no way to face the great advantages of another person than through love.

Hatred is partial, but love is still more so.

So much has already been said about Shakespeare that there doesn't seem to be anything more to say; yet it is the quality of the spirit that it forever stimulates the spirit.

Nature is so perfect that the Trinity couldn't have fashioned her any more perfect. She is an organ on which our Lord plays and the devil works the bellows.

That we understand something perfectly, that we accomplish something better than anyone else around us, that is what matters.

Reason looks at necessity as the basis of the world; reason is able to turn chance in your favor and use it. Only by having reasonremain strong and unshakable can we be called a god of the earth.

One spares old people just as one spares children.

One usually thinks people to be more dangerous than they are.

Even though the world as a whole progresses, youth must always start again from the beginning, and as individuals go through the epochs of the world's culture.

If youth is a fault, it is one that one gets rid of soon enough.

Aptitudes are assumed, they should become accomplishments. That is the purpose of all education.

For precisely when concepts fail one, Words are found at the right time.

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.

Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.

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.

Architecture is crystallized music.

Let us live, while we are alive!

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.

Over all the mountain tops is peace.

The absence of temptation is the absence of virtue.

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.

Art is a mediator of the unspeakable.

What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.

And step by step, along the path of life, There's nothing true but Heaven.

There is no remedy but love for the great superiority of others

If all these devils really exist it proves there must be angels, too.

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.

When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.

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.

The hardest thing is to see what's under your very eyes.

The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.

A state of true and universal tolerance is best ensured by leaving alone the peculiarities of men and peoples.

What sort of God would it be, who only pushed from without.

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.

A phenomenon like Mozart remains an inexplicable thing.

Enthusiasm is of the greatest value, so long as we are not carried away by it.