Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
theatre manager, botanist, politician, painter, philosopher, theologian, jurist, art critic, music critic, librarian, poet, travel writer, physicist, literary scholar, novelist, playwright, autobiographer, diplomat, statesperson, polymath, aphorist, diarist, mineralogist, zoologist, art theorist, lawyer, composer, librettist, writer, visual artist, art historian, exlibrist, draftsperson, watercolorist, print collector, art collector, printmaker
Read on Wikipedia1749 – 1832
All Quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.”
“A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.”
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
“Great thoughts and a pure heart, that is what we should ask from God.”
“This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.”
“The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.”
“Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.”
“Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.”
“This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.”
“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
“Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.”
“Love does not dominate; it cultivates.”
“I love those who yearn for the impossible.”
“Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.”
“Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.”
“Personality is everything in art and poetry.”
“The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.”
“Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.”
“Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.”
“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
“Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home.”
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.”
“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”
“The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.”
“To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.”
“All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.”
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
“Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.”
“I hold to faith in the divine love — which, so many years ago for a brief moment in a little corner of the earth, walked about as a man bearing the name of Jesus Christ — as the foundation on which alone my happiness rests.”
“One lives but once in the world.”
“Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.”
“Getting along with women, Thus one goes through the world.”
“When young, one is confident to be able to build palaces for mankind, but when the time comes one has one's hands full just to be able to remove their trash.”
“Noble be man, On earth.”
“As great, everlasting, Of our existence.”
“There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.”
“Only mankind To the moment.”
“Let the noble man For those beings whom he surmises.”
“A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.”
“It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.”
“A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.”
“Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.”
“We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.”
“The spirits that I summoned upI now can't rid myself of.”
“This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.”
“One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.”
“The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.”
“In limitations he first shows himself the master,And the law can only bring us freedom.”
“Character develops itself in the stream of life.”
“One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.”
“I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way.”
“Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.”
“Patriotism ruins history.”
“Who wants to understand the poemMust go to the poet's land.”
“For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.”
“Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?”
“All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.”
“I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. ... I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”
“One must be something in order to do something.”
“I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.”
“Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.”
“If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.”
“The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.”
“O'er all the hilltopsThou too shalt rest.”
“Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, Even at setting, the sun is still the same glorious planet.”
“And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.”
“He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as Divine Law, and not as a book of a human being made for education or entertainment.”
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
“No matter how far our spiritual culture may continue to progress, no matter how much the natural sciences may grow, becoming ever more profound and more inclusive, no matter how much the human spirit may will to expand, that human spirit will never escape from the majesty and ethical sublimity of Christianity, as it shimmers and shines in the Gospels.”
“Personality is everything in art and poetry.”
“Young Schopenhauer, a zealous and thorough-going Kantian, tried to explain that light would cease to exist along with the seeing eye. "What!" he said, according to Schopenhauer's own report, "looking at him with his Jove-like eyes,"—"You should rather say that you would not exist if the light could not see you?"”
“However often we turn to it [the Qur'an] at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence... Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim is stern, grand, terrible — ever and anon truly sublime — Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence.”
“Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom,And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?”
“What's it to you if I love you?”
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
“At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.”
“To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence — this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden.”
“Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds.”
“Seeking with the soul the land of the Greeks.”
“One says a lot in vain, refusing;The other mainly hears the "No."”
“Pleasure and love are the pinions of great deeds.”
“Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others.”
“Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces!Eternal Rome, it's only for me all is still.”
“Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.”
“I'm gazing at church and palace, ruin and column,The world isn't the world, and Rome can't be Rome.”
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
“Ah, how often I've cursed those foolish pages,His sad ghost could hardly have persecuted me more.”
“The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.”
“A world without love would be no world.”
“Beloved, don't fret that you gave yourself so quickly!Desire followed a look, and joy followed desire.”
“Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.”
“I feel I'm happily inspired now on Classical soil:Of her lovely breasts: her hips guiding my hand?”
“All Nine often used to come to me, I mean the Muses:Greetings, Boredom, mother of the Muse.”
“It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.”
“Is it so big a mystery so the mystery hangs on.”
“Much there is I can stand. Most things not easy to sufferThese four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs and garlic and Christ.”
“Much there is I can stand, and most things not easy to suffer These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs, garlic, and †.”
“Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.”
“Doesn't surprise me that Christ our Lord I go in for that myself.”
“Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.”
“I call architecture frozen music.”
“Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed.”
“The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.”
“One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows.”
“The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.”
“Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.”
“No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.”
“A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.”
“My son, whoever wishes to keep a secret, must hide from us that he possesses one. Self complaisance over the concealed destroys its concealment.”
“Law is mighty, mightier necessity.”
“Once a man's thirty, he's already old,It's best to kill him right away.”
“What wise or stupid thing can man conceiveThat was not thought of in ages long ago?”
“I love those who yearn for the impossible.”
“The deed is everything, the glory nothing.”
“Behaviour is a mirror in which everyone shows his image.”
“Mysteries do not as yet amount to miracles.”
“It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.”
“Just as, out of habit, one consults a run-down clock as though it were still going, so too one may look at the face of a beautiful woman as though she were still in love.”
“You really only know when you know little. Doubt grows with knowledge.”
“The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.”
“The first and last thing demanded of genius is love of truth.”
“Translators are like busy match-makers: they sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty, and extol her charms, and arouse an irresistible longing for the original.”
“Theories usually result from the precipitate reasoning of an impatient mind which would like to be rid of phenomena and replaces them with images, concepts, indeed often with mere words.”
“There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before — you've just got to try to think it all over again.”
“Everything that liberates our mind without at the same time imparting self-control is pernicious.”
“Piety is not an end but a means to attain by the greatest peace of mind the highest degree of culture.”
“This is why we may say that those who parade piety as a purpose and an aim mostly turn into hypocrites”
“When you see some evil you proceed to immediate action, you make an immediate attack to cure the symptom.”
“A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.”
“The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted.”
“Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.”
“I see no end to my misery but the grave.”
“Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.”
“A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.”
“Hypotheses are scaffoldings erected in front of a building and then dismantled when the building is finished. They are indispensable for the workman; but you mustn't mistake the scaffolding for the building.”
“Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.”
“Age merely shows what children we remain.”
“He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”
“If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.”
“Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
“I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.”
“We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.”
“Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.”
“He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.”
“Doubt grows with knowledge.”
“All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.”
“Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.”
“He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.”
“What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.”
“The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.”
“Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.”
“To rule is easy, to govern difficult.”
“Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
“Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.”
“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
“Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.”
“Great thoughts and a pure heart, that is what we should ask from God.”
“Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.”
“He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines.”
“All things are only transitory.”
“What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.”
“Nothing is worth more than this day.”
“Naturalists tell of a noble race of horses that instinctively open a vein with their teeth, when heated and exhausted by a long course, in order to breathe more freely. I am often tempted to open a vein, to procure for myself everlasting liberty.”
“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”