Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

625 Sourced Quotes

The sea is flowing ever, The land retains it never.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What a master a man would be in his own subject if he taught nothing useless!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Words are good, but there is something better. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the chief matter. Action can only be understood and represented by the spirit.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He is a man whom it is impossible to please, because he is never pleased with himself.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Still this planet's soil for noble deeds grants scope abounding.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Individual observations, drawn from the natural objects with which we are in contact, are often the more valuable, the less the observer professionally belongs to the particular department of science which he illustrates.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sound and sufficient reason falls, after all, to the share of but few men, and those few men exert their influence in silence.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I have heard myself accused of being an opponent, an enemy of mathematics, which no one can value more highly than I, for it accomplishes the very thing whose achievement has been denied me.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wind is the loving Wooer of waters; Wind blends together Billows all-foaming. Spirit of man, Thou art like unto water! Fortune of man, Thou art like unto wind!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I could have never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a substance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When we find facts within our knowledge exhibited by some new method, or even, it may be, described in a foreign language, they receive a peculiar charm of novelty and wear a fresh air.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The longer I live, the more it grieves me to see man, who occupies his supreme place for the very purpose of imposing his will upon nature, and freeing himself and his from an outrageous necessity--to see him taken up with some false notion, and doing just the opposite of what he wants to do; and then, because the whole bent of his mind is spoilt, bungling miserably over everything.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You often say to yourself in the course of your life that you ought to avoid having too much business, 'polypragmosyne' [incessant activity], and, more especially, that the older you get, the more you ought to avoid entering on new business. But it's all very well saying this, and giving yourself andothers good advice. The very fact of growing older means taking up a new business; all our circumstances change, and we must either stop doing anything at all or else willing and consciously take on the new role we have to play on life's stage.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Behaviour is a mirror in which everyone shows his image.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wine rejoices the heart of man and joy is the mother of all virtues.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You ask which form of government is the best? Whichever teaches us to govern ourselves.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
How many years must a man do nothing, before he can at all know what is to be done and how to do it!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This is wisdom's final thought:
Freedom alone he earns as well as life
Who day by day must conquer them anew.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe