Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists.

To make an epoch in the world, two conditions are manifestly essential-a good head and a great inheritance.

One can't dull a project better than by discussing it repeatedly.

Help me to discover Thy truth, O Lord, and preserve me from those who have already found it

The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people is satisfied with ornament.

Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.

To make a young couple love each other, it is only necessary to oppose and separate them.

Let him who believes in immortality enjoy his happiness in silence; he has no reason to give himself airs about it.

Man errs as long as he strives.

On the pinnacle of success man does not stand firm long.

Secrecy has many advantages, for when you tell someone the purpose of any object right away, they often think there is nothing to it.

If we are out of synch with ourselves, everything is out of synch for us.

Forget not that the man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts in silence, and find his reward in the exercise of them, will generally find himself badly off.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

The people rate strength before everything.

There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings.

Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

Men's prejudices rest upon their character for the time being and cannot be overcome, as being part and parcel of themselves. Neither evidence nor common sense nor reason has the slightest influence upon them.

No one should be rich except those who understand it.

Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.

When she sees the leaves fall, they raise no other idea in her mind than that winter is approaching.

Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.

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

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more.

Ah! my poor brain is racked and crazed, My spirit and senses amazed!

Moral epochs have their course as well as the seasons. We can no more hold them fast than we can hold sun, moon, and stars. Our faults perpetually return upon us; and herein lies the subtlest difficulty of self-knowledge.

It is equally a mistake to hold one's self too high, or to rate one's self too cheap.

He who is firm and resolute in will molds the world to himself.

I do not now begin, - I still adore Her whom I early cherish'd in my breast; Then once again with prudence dispossess'd, And to whose heart I'm driven back once more. The love of Petrarch, that all-glorious love, Was unrequited, and, alas, full sad.

It would not be worth your while to reach the age of seventy if all the wisdom of the world were to be foolishness before God.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The soul of the Christian religion is reverence.

Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation.

If you don't know foreign languages, you don't know anything about your own.

If ever the Divine appeared on earth, it was in the person of Christ.

Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is moat thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy boat among miners; and so with everything else.

I wait for the morning of my tears

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds.

Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.

Alas, that we should be so unwilling to listen to the still and holy yearnings of the heart! A god whispers quite softly in our breast, softly yet audibly; telling us what we ought to seek and what to shun.

What chance gathers, she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.

Nothing is so atrocious as fancy without taste.

Treat a person as they are, they will remain so. Treat a person the way that person can be and is capable of being and that person will become as he or she can be and should be.

The man of understanding finds everything laughable.

Yet here I stand poor fool what more, not one wit wiser than before.

When you praise someone you call yourself his equal.

Faith is a homely, private capital; as there are public savings-banks and poor funds, out of which in times of want we can relieve the necessities of individuals, so here the faithful take their coin in peace.