Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic

How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to.

The realization of the self is only possible if one is productive, if one can give birth to one's own potentialities.

The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else.

A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

To understand one thing well is better than understanding many things by halves.

Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.

And I like those authors best whose scenes describe my own situation in life-- and the friends who are about me whose stories touch me with interest, from resembling my own homely existence.

The rose is wont with pride to swell, and ever seeks to rise.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

The thinking person has the strange characteristic to like to create a fantasy in the place of the unsolved problem, a fantasy that stays with the person even when the problem has been solved and truth made its appearance.

The man who acts never has any conscience; no one has any conscience but the man who thinks

Where I cannot be moral, my power is gone.

Woe to falsehood! it affords no relief to the breast, like truth; it gives us no comfort, pains him who forges it, and like an arrow directed by a god flies back and wounds the archer.

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

For a strolling damsel a doubtful reputation bears.

The rainbow mirrors human aims and action. Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing Life is but light in many-hued reflection.

Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there.

Energy is the basis of everything. Every Jew, no matter how insignificant, is engaged in some decisive and immediate pursuit of a goal... It is the most perpetual people of the earth.

The best fortune that can fall to a man is that which corrects his defects and makes up for his failings.

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

We are our own aptest deceiver.

Yet he who grasps the moment's gift, He is the proper man.

The arts are the salt of the earth; as salt relates to food, the arts relate to technology.

Great passions are incurable diseases.

It is only necessary to grow old to become more charitable and even indulgent. I see no fault committed by others that I have not committed myself.

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.

Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

To tremble before anticipated evils is to bemoan what thou hast never lost.

What in us the women leave uncultivated, children cultivate when we retain them near us.

We are forced to participate in the games of life before we can possibly learn how to use the options in the rules governing them.

Thou art in the end what thou art. Put on wigs with millions of curls, set thy foot upon ell-high rocks. Thou abidest ever--what thou art.

If one mistreats citizens of foreign countries, one infringes upon one's duty toward one's own subjects; for thus one exposes themto the law of retribution.

Thus I reel from desire to fulfillment and in fulfillment languish for desire.

In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed.

It is a maxim of wise government to treat people not as they should be but as they actually are.

Aptitudes are assumed, they should become accomplishments. That is the purpose of all education.

Of the truly creative no one is ever master; it must be left to go its own way.

A vain man can never be utterly ruthless: he wants to win applause and therefore he accommodates himself to others

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael.

Noble be man, helpful and good!

Even dirt glitters when the sun is shining upon it

Association with women is the basis of good manners.

A person is never happy till their vague strivings has itself marked out its proper limitations.