Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Man Quotes

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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
Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One should not wish anyone disagreeable conditions of life; but for him who is involved in them by chance, they are touchstones of characters and of the most decisive value to man.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.

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
For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.

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
Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world, becoming aware of it if only within himself, and of himself self only within it. Each new subject, well observed, opens up within us a new organ of thought.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The greatest happiness for the thinking man is to have fathomed the fathomable, and to quietly revere the unfathomable.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A vain man can never be altogether rude. Desirous as he is of pleasing, he fashions his manners after those of others.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is a calamity that the use of experiment has severed nature from man, so that he is content to understand nature merely through what artificial instruments reveal and by so doing even restricts her achievements... Microscopes and telescopes, in actual fact, confuse man's innate clarity of mind.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
While man's desires and aspirations stir he cannot choose but err.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

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
A man avails himself of the truth so long as it is serviceable; but he seizes on what is false with a passionate eloquence as soon as he can make a momentary use of it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Say what you will of fortitude, but show me the man who can patiently endure the laughter of fools when they have obtained an advantage over him. 'Tis only when their nonsense is without foundation that one can suffer it without complaint.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every bird has its decoy, and every man is led and misled in his own peculiar way.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In order to depict nature in its exalted sublimity, we must not dwell exclusively on its external manifestations, but we must trace its image, reflected in the mind of man, at one time filling the dreamy land of physical myths with forms of grace and beauty, and at another developing the noble germ of artistic creations.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I'm gazing at church and palace, ruin and column,
Like a serious man making sensible use of a journey,
But soon it will happen, and all will be one vast temple,
Love's temple, receiving its new initiate.
Though you're a whole world, Rome, still, without Love,
The world isn't the world, and Rome can't be Rome.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man is born, not to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out where the problem applies, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?

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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There are not a few problems in the natural sciences of which a man cannot speak justly without calling metaphysics to his aid; not technical words about knowing and being, such as make a show in the schools, but that wisdom of thought which was before all physics, lives with it, and will endure after it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is no better deliverance from the world than through art, and a man can form no surer bond with it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If a man knows where to get good advice, it is as though he could supply it himself.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe