The only way to have a friend is to be one.

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.