Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.

To know where a thing is we must have found it.

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.

There are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.

While man's desires and aspirations stir he cannot choose but err.

My days are as happy as those reserved by God for his elect; and whatever be my fate hereafter, I can never say that I have not tasted joy— the purest joy of life.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather....In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or is dehumanized.

Tomorrow sees undone, what happens not to-day; Still forward press, nor never tire! The possible, with steadfast trust, Resolve should be by the forelock grasp. Then she will ne'er let go her clasp, And labors on, because she must.

The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it... but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

Mastery passes often for egotism.

Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap.

At bottom, no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly.

How can we know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Begin at once to do your duty and immediately you will know what is inside you.

A great deal may be done by severity, more by love, but most by clear discernment and impartial justice.

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

Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy, must we also rob one another of the pleasures that any heart may permit itself now and then? And name me a person who in a bad mood will be decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him. Is it not rather an inner dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves that is always associated with envy aggravated by foolish conceit? We see people happy and not made happy by us, and that is unbearable.

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies

We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.

Here too it’s masquerade, I find: As everywhere, the dance of mind. I grasped a lovely masked procession, And caught things from a horror show… I’d gladly settle for a false impression, If it would last a little longer, though.

For what one has in black and white, One can carry home in comfort.

Oral delivery aims at persuasion and making the listener believe they are converted. Few persons are capable of being convinced the majority allow themselves to be persuaded.

Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.

Life is not anything, but an opportunity for something.

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

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.

Courage and modesty are the most unequivocal of virtues, for they are of a kind that hypocrisy cannot imitate; they too have this quality in common, that they are expressed by the same color.

Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

He who can not learn to love must flatter.

It is much easier to meet with error than to find truth; error is on the surface, and can be more easily met with; truth is hid in great depths, the way to seek does not appear to all the world.

To make converts is the natural ambition of everyone.

Each one of us must carry within the proof of immortality, it cannot be given from outside of us. To be sure, everything in natureis change but behind the change there is something eternal.

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.

Any trifle is enough to entertain two lovers.

Several classical sayings that one likes to repeat had quite a different meaning from the ones later times attributed to them.

Nobody, they say, is a hero to his valet. Of course; for a man must be a hero to understand a hero. The valet, I dare say, has great respect for some person of his own stamp.

No one knows what he is doing so long as he is acting rightly; but of what is wrong one is always conscious.

Miracle is the pet child of faith.

A useless life is an early death.

You don't love if you don't take the beloved's faults for virtues.

Time flies, and what is past is done.

In every artist there is a touch of audacity without which no talent is conceivable.

You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.

The ideal of beauty is simplicity and tranquility.