Goethe Quotes

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.

To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.

The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.

I bid the chords sweet music make, And all must follow in my wake.

Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at.

A person hears only what they understand.

I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.

By seeking and blundering we learn.

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.

Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.

Instruction does much, but encouragement everything." (Letter to A.F. Oeser, Nov. 9, 1768)

Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.

Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

I love those who yearn for the impossible.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

Everything is hard before it is easy

Nothing is worth more than this day.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Who are you then?" "I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.

Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.

When we treat people merely as they are, they will remain as they are. When we treat them as if they were what they should be, they will become what they should be.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.

There is strong shadow where there is much light.

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.

People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude towards the public.

Sometimes I don't understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her!

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.

Talent develops in solitude, character develops in the stream of life.

This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.

God help us -- for art is long, and life so short.

If you don't feel it, you'll never get it.

All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

It's true that nothing in this world makes us so necessary to others as the affection we have for them.

No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.

Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.

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

If you would create something, you must be something.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!

You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.

Leap and the net will appear.

We know accurately only when we know little; doubt grows with knowledge.

Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Doubt can only be removed by action.

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever. Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.

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.

Remember to live.

The intelligent man finds everything laughable, the sensible man hardly anything.

The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

I laugh at my heart, and do its will.

Faust: Who holds the devil, let him hold him well, He hardly will be caught a second time.

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

Here too it’s masquerade, I find: As everywhere, the dance of mind. I grasped a lovely masked procession, And caught things from a horror show… I’d gladly settle for a false impression, If it would last a little longer, though.

To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.

Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it right away. I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death. In the calm water of the love-nights, where you were begotten, where you have begotten, a strange feeling comes over you, when you see the silent candle burning. Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness, and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward. Distance does not make you falter. Now, arriving in magic, flying, and finally, insane for the light, you are the butterfly and you are gone. And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

And when I look around the apartment where I now am,—when I see Charlotte’s apparel lying before me, and Albert’s writings, and all those articles of furniture which are so familiar to me, even to the very inkstand which I am using,—when I think what I am to this family—everything. My friends esteem me; I often contribute to their happiness, and my heart seems as if it could not beat without them; and yet—if I were to die, if I were to be summoned from the midst of this circle, would they feel—or how long would they feel—the void which my loss would make in their existence? How long! Yes, such is the frailty of man, that even there, where he has the greatest consciousness of his own being, where he makes the strongest and most forcible impression, even in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish,—vanish,—and that quickly. I could tear open my bosom with vexation to think how little we are capable of influencing the feelings of each other. No one can communicate to me those sensations of love, joy, rapture, and delight which I do not naturally possess; and though my heart may glow with the most lively affection, I cannot make the happiness of one in whom the same warmth is not inherent. Sometimes I don’t understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her! I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing. One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. Do not children touch everything they see? And I! Witness, Heaven, how often I lie down in my bed with a wish, and even a hope, that I may never awaken again! And in the morning, when I open my eyes, I behold the sun once more, and am wretched. If I were whimsical, I might blame the weather, or an acquaintance, or some personal disappointment, for my discontented mind; and then this insupportable load of trouble would not rest entirely upon myself. But, alas! I feel it too sadly; I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not? Truly, my own bosom contains the source of all my pleasure. Am I not the same being who once enjoyed an excess of happiness, who at every step saw paradise open before him, and whose heart was ever expanded towards the whole world? And this heart is now dead; no sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry; and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life: that active, sacred power which created worlds around me,—it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills, and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists, and illuminating the country around, which is still wrapped in silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows, which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to extract one tear of joy from my withered heart,—I feel that in such a moment I stand like a reprobate before heaven, hardened, insensible, and unmoved. Oftentimes do I then bend my knee to the earth, and implore God for the blessing of tears, as the desponding labourer in some scorching climate prays for the dews of heaven to moisten his parched corn.