Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

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Properly speaking, we learn from those books only that we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticise would have to learn from me.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The world sees only the reflection of merit; therefore when you come to know a really great man intimately, you may as often find him above as below his reputation.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is difficult to know how to treat the errors of the age. If a man oppose them, he stands alone; if he surrender to them, they bring him neither joy nor credit.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
She loves herself, and her innumerable eyes and affections are fixed upon herself. She has divided herself that she may be her own delight. She causes an endless succession of new capacities for enjoyment to spring up, that her insatiable sympathy may be assuaged.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No one feels himself easy in a garden which does not look like the open country.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We accept every person in the world as that for which he gives himself out, only he must give himself out for something. We can put up with the unpleasant more easily than we can endure the insignificant.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The mathematician is perfect only in so far as he is a perfect being, in so far as he perceives the beauty of truth; only then will his work be thorough, transparent, comprehensive, pure, clear, attractive, and even elegant.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
At bottom, no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All theory, my friend, is grey, But green is life's glad golden tree.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Beauty is at once the ultimate principle and the highest aim of art.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He who would study organic existence, First drives out the soul with rigid persistence; Then the parts in his hand he may hold and class, But the spiritual link is lost,

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All rights and laws are still transmitted,
Like an eternal sickness to the race.
In German: Es erben sich Gesetz and Rechte Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquility of soul. Hence it may be observed that those who set up piety as an end and object are mostly hypocrites.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Who can think wise or stupid things at all that were not thought already in the past.
In German: Wer kann was Dummes, wer was Kluges denken, Das nicht die Vorwelt schon gedacht.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man must always in some sense cling to the belief that the unknowable is knowable, otherwise speculation would cease.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Stood I, O Nature! man alone in thee, Then were it worth one's while a man to be.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The students of physical science are but too prone to take each phenomenon for granted, and at once to jump to a conclusion. Hence then - knowledge is unsatisfactory and chiefly hypothetical.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In society every man is taken for what he gives himself out to be; but he must give himself out to be something. Better to be slightly disagreeable than altogether insignificant.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I have always paid attention to the merits of my enemies, and found it an advantage.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
People do not understand what it costs in time and suffering to learn how to read. I have been working at it for eighty years, and I still can't say that I've succeeded.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe