Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Man Quotes

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Every man bears something within him that, if it were publicly announced, would excite feelings of aversion.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If there is confusion in your head and in your heart, what more do you want! A man who no longer loves and no longer errs should have himself buried straight away.

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
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
Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them.

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

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 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
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
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 wise or stupid thing can man conceive
That was not thought of in ages long ago?

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
It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being... He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instil his strength into the invalid by whose bedside he is seated.

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
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
The saying that no one who is unacquainted with, or a stranger to, geometry, should enter the school of the philosopher, does not mean that a man must be a mathematician in order to become a sage.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man is a simple being, and however rich, varied, and unfathomable he may be, the cycle of his situations is soon run through.

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
While man's desires and aspirations stir he cannot choose but err.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

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
Man usually believes, if only words he hears,
That also with them goes material for thinking.
In German: Gewohnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hort, Es musse sich dabei doch auch was denken.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man would not be the finest creature in the world if he were not too fine for it.

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
He who thinks to realize when he is older the hopes and desires of youth is always deceiving himself, for every decade of a man's life possesses its own kind of happiness, its own hopes and prospects.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
She has always thought and always thinks; though not as a man, but as Nature. She broods over an all-comprehending idea, which no searching can find out.

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
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
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