Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

What is part of you, you cannot get rid of, even if you were to throw it away.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

The sickness of the heart is most easily got rid of by complaining and soothing confidence.

There is no trifling with nature; it is always true, grave, and severe; it is always in the light, and the faults and errors fall to our share. It defies incompetency, but reveals its secrets to the competent, the truthful, and the pure.

Were not the eye made to receive the rays of the sun, it could not behold the sun; if the peculiar power of God lay not in us, how could the godlike charm us?

Every form correctly seen is beautiful

The loss of a much-prized treasure is only half felt when we have not regarded its tenure as secure.

God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.

The follies of the wise man are known to himself, but hidden from the world.

Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination.

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.

Art is a mediator of the unspeakable.

As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.

Talents are nurtured best in solitude, But character on life's tempestuous seas!

Conscience is the virtue of the observers not the agents of action

Words express neither objects nor ourselves.

It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.

Make the most of time, it flies away so fast; yet method will teach you to win time.

Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.

To become aware in time when young of the advantages of age; to maintain the advantages of youth in old age: both are pure fortune.

When married one has to get into an argument once in a while since in this way one learns about the other.

Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis between receiving and giving.

The wealth that cannot be administered is a burden.

Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight.

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

If one doesn't know one's own country, one doesn't have standards for foreign countries.

What right those who govern have to govern they don't question, they just govern. Whether the people have a right to depose them that doesn't concern them. All they are concerned with is that the people will not be tempted to depose them.

Only the soul that loves is happy

Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.

It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.

It is belief in the Bible, the fruits of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. I have found capital safely invested and richly productive of interest, although I have sometimes made but a bad use of it.

At all times it has not been the age, but individuals alone, who have worked for knowledge. It was the age which put Socrates to death by poison, the age which burnt Huss. The ages have always remained alike.

A noble soul alone can noble souls attract; And knows alone, as ye, to hold them.

Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.

Life's objective is life itself.

If you want a wise answer, ask a reasonable question.

If I say to the moment: 'Stay now! You are so beautiful'!

Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things are little.

Mannerism is always longing to have done, and has no true enjoyment in work. A genuine, really great talent, on the other hand, has its greatest happiness in execution.

A state of true and universal tolerance is best ensured by leaving alone the peculiarities of men and peoples.

A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

Voluntary dependence is the wonderful form of existence, and how could that be possible without love?

Children, love one another, and if that is not possible-at least try to put up with one another.

The sun had, in the meanwhile, sunk behind the Ettersberg. We felt in the wood the chill of the evening, and drove all the quicker to Wiemar, and to Goethe's house. Goethe urged me to go in with him for a while, and I did so. He was in an extremely engaging mood. He talked a great deal about his theory of colors, and of his obstinate opponents; remarking that he was sure that he had done something in this science.

For the butterfly, mating and propagation involve the sacrifice of life, for the human being, the sacrifice of beauty.

Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.