Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Man Quotes

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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
The architect hands over to the rich man with the keys to his palace all the ease and comfort to be found in it without being able to enjoy any of it himself. Must the artist not in this way gradually become alienated from his art, since his work, like a child that has been provided for and left home, can no longer have any effect upon its father? And how beneficial it must have been for art when it was intended to be concerned almost exclusively with what was public property, and belonged to everybody and therefore also to the artist!

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 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
A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

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
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
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
The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude.

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

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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is well for us that man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic.

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
Beware of her fair hair, for she excels All women in the magic of her locks; And when she winds them round a young man's neck, She will not ever set him free again.

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
A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.

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
The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The world runs on from one folly to another; and the man who, solely from regard to the opinion of others, and without any wish or necessity of his own, toils after gold, honour, or any other phantom, is no better than 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 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
First let a man teach himself, and then he will be taught by others.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Sets hims apart
From every other creature
On earth.

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 thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The man who occupies the first place seldom plays the principal part.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Is it so big a mystery
what god and man and world are?
No! but nobody knows how to solve it
so the mystery hangs on.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe