Von 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I love those who yearn for the impossible.

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

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

If you would create something, you must be something.

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.

Doubt can only be removed by action.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

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.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

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.

Remember to live.

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

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

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

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

I laugh at my heart, and do its will.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

What is uttered from the heart alone will win the heart of others to your own.

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.

Once I blazed across the sky, Leaving trails of flame; I fell to earth, and here I lie - Who'll help me up again? -A Shooting Star

Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own.

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.

Everybody wants to be somebody,but nobody wants to grow...

What a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it!

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

Was ich weiß, kann jeder wissen. Mein Herz hab' ich allein.

Oblivion is full of people who allow the opinions of others to overrule their belief in themselves.

What I possess, seems far away to me, and what is gone becomes reality.

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.

Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, And each will wrestle for the mastery there.

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!

One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.

The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.

I am the spirit that negates. And rightly so, for all that comes to be Deserves to perish wretchedly; 'Twere better nothing would begin. Thus everything that that your terms, sin, Destruction, evil represent— That is my proper element.

We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.

Every day I observe more and more the folly of judging of others by ourselves; and I have so much trouble with myself, and my own heart is in such constant agitation, that I am well content to let others pursue their own course, if they only allow me the same privilege.

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.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

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.