Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful.

The march of intellect, which licks all the world into shape, has even reached the devil.

I must consider more closely this cycle of good and bad days which I find coursing within myself. Passion, attachment, the urge to action, inventiveness, performance, order all alternate and keep their orbit; cheerfulness, vigor, energy, flexibility and fatigue, serenity as well as desire. Nothing disturbs the cycle for I lead a simple life, but I must still find the time and order in which I rotate.

No one as ever completed their apprenticeship.

Wanted: A dog that neither barks nor bites, eats broken glass and shits diamonds.

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.

You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.

Begin by instructing yourself, then you will receive instruction from others.

Children, like dogs, have so sharp and fine a scent that they detect and hunt out everything--the bad before all the rest. They also know well enough how this or that friend stands with their parents; and as they practice no dissimulation whatever, they serve as excellent barometers by which to observe the degree of favor or disfavor at which we stand with their parents.

Rest not Life is sweeping by go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.

They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless.

Once more I am a wanderer, a pilgrim, through the world. But what else are you?

One errs as long as one strives.

I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner.

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

Mere curiosity adds wings to every step.

Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.

When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.

A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.

The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity - a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.

Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world, for he knows how to introduce the former at fit place in conversation.

This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.

The art of governing is a great metier, requiring the whole man, and it is therefore not well for a ruler to have too strong tendencies for other affairs.

Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity.

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

We can always redeem the man who aspires and strives.

Each indecision brings its own delays and days are lost lamenting over lost days... What you can do or think you can do, begin it. For boldness has magic, power, and genius in it.

Such is the frailty of man that even where he makes the truest and most forcible impression in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish.

The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.

The real scholar learns how to evolve the unknown from the known, and draws near the master.

Everything perfect in its kind has to transcend its own kind, it must become something different and incomparable. In some notes the nightingale is still a bird; then it rises above its class and seems to suggest to every winged creature what singing is truly like.

The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.

The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.

There is no way to face the great advantages of another person than through love.

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

A rainbow which lasts for a quarter of an hour is looked at no longer.

When we see the many grave-stones which have fallen in, which have been defaced by the footsteps of the congregation, which lie buried under the ruins of the churches, that have themselves crumbled together over them; we may fancy the life after death to be as a second life, into which man enters in the figure, or the picture or the inscription, and lives longer there than when he was really alive. But this figure also, this second existence, dies out too, sooner or later. Time will not allow himself to be cheated of his rights with the monuments of men or with themselves.

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.

I had rather be Mercury, the smallest among seven [planets], revolving round the sun, than the first among five [moons] revolving round Saturn.

When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it's alive; then they have the parts and the'be lost the whole, for the link that's missing was the living soul.

Whether one show one's self a man of genius in science or compose a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on.

Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

Never by reflection, but only by doing is self- knowledge possible to one.

Every man bears something within him that, if it were publicly announced, would excite feelings of aversion.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

How can we learn self-knowledge? Never by taking thought but rather by action. Try to do your duty and you'll soon discover what you're like.

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

One that does not think to highly of himself is more than he thinks.