Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Quotes

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

Dispel not, the happy delusions of children.

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

Words express neither objects nor ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The happy do not believe in miracles.

Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

To make something you have to be something.

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

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

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

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

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

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

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

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

All things are only transitory.

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

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

Only the heart without a stain knows ease.

The whole history of the Christian Church is a mixture of errors and violence.

If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much

Even dirt glitters when the sun is shining upon it

In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed.

A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

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

There is no better deliverance from the world than through art, and a man can form no surer bond with it.

The human mind will not be confined to any limits.

There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.

Those that are firm in their will mold the world to themselves.

One alone does not help, but rather he who unites with many at the right moment.

We can offer up much in the large, but to make sacrifices in little things is what we are seldom equal to.

What by a straight path cannot be reached by crooked ways is never won.

Marriage is the beginning and pinnacle of civilization.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.