The gates of thought, - how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.

Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.

Insist on yourself. Never imitate.

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

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.

Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive.