There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

Rash, inexperienced youth holds itself a chosen instrument, and allows itself unbounded license.

Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.

To accept good advice is but to increase one's own ability.

nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.

I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.

Fret not over the irretrievable, but ever act as if thy life were just begun.