It is better to be deceived by one's friends than to deceive them.

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

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

I have observed that as long as one lives and bestirs himself, he can always find food and raiment, though it may not be of the choicest description.

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