Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Quotes

Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.

Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.

For in music there is no material to be deducted.

To end the greatest work designed, A thousand hands need but one mind.

What you feed in yourself that grows.

I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.

Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.

I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

It seems it has been my fate to sadden those I should have made happy.

I could be living the best and happiest of lives if only I were not a fool.

We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.

We really learn only from those books that we cannot judge. The author of a book that we were able to judge would have to learn from us.

Must it so be that whatever makes man happy must later become the source of his misery?

Only air and light and the love of friends! Let no man lose heart who still has these.

When a human awakens to a great dream and throws the full force of his soul over it, all the universe conspires in your favor.

But there are times, " said Charlotte, "when it is necessary and an act of friendship to write nothing rather than not to write.

Everything is just how I imagined it, yet everything is new

We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.

Once we are lost unto ourselves, everything else is lost to us.

By Fortune's adverse buffets overborneTo solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn, And not in utter loneliness to live, Myself at last did to the Devil give!

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

If I wasn't a devil myself I'd give Me up to the Devil this very minute.

It is not easy in this world for one person to understand the next one.

Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.

Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)

A mans manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

Each one sees what he carries in his heart.

It is ever true that he who does nothing for others, does nothing for himself.

Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life.

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they find to laugh at.

Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.

Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.

Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbartThe human power is revealed by poetIl potere dell'umanità si rivela nel poeta

The world turns gray, the air grows cool, the fog blows in. Only at evening can you really value home.

Grant me one hour on love’s most sacred shoresTo clasp the bosom that my soul adores, Lie heart to heart and merge my soul with yours.

Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.

Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath.

Solitude is precious balm to my heart in these paradistic parts.

The things I know, every man can know, but, oh, my heart is mine alone!

The Church has an excellent appetite. She has swallowed whole countries and the questionHas never risen of indigestion. Only the Church . . . can take Ill-gotten goods without stomach-ache!

In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm. ... In the real world, all rests on perseverance.

Gracious Providence, to whom I owe all my powers, why didst thou not withhold some of those blessings I possess, and substitute in their place a feeling of self-confidence and contentment?

There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.

In all things it is better to hope than to despair.