Goethe Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Goethe
Goethe Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Goethe quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
While man's desires and aspirations stir he cannot choose but err.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Noble be man, helpful and good!
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It is not enough to have knowledge; one must apply it. It is not enough to have wishes; one must also accomplish it.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
We have time enough if we but use it aright
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The best pleasures of this world are not quite true.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
If I love you, what business is it of yours?
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
I know nothing more mocking than a devil that despairs.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Piety is not a goal but a means to attain through the purest peace of mind the highest culture.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn't begrudge his son's talent.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
He loves not who does not see the faults of the beloved as virtues.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Of all thieves, fools are the worst; they rob you of time and temper.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
People always fancy that we must become old to become wise; but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to keep ourselves as wise as we were.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Stones are mute teachers; they silence the observer, and the most valuable lesson we learn from them we cannot communicate.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Things unused burden and beset.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The town itself is disagreeable; but then, all around, you find an inexpressible beauty of nature.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness, and especially for yellow-red.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Only the heart without a stain knows perfect ease.[Ger., Ganz unbefleckt geniesst sich nur das Herz.] — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The most fortunate of men, Be he a king or commoner, is he Whose welfare is assured in his own home.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Our virtues and view spring from one root.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
15General ideas and great conceit are always a fair way to bring about terrible misfortune. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
All one needs to do is declare oneself free and one will immediately feel dependent. If you dare to declare yourself dependent, you feel independent.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
A man doesn't learn to understand anything unless he loves it.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Look at a man the way he is and he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Every offense is avenged on earth.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The artist has a twofold relation to nature; he is at once her master and her slave.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
One should not search for anything behind the phenomena. They themselves are the message.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
If each one does their duty as an individual and if each one works in their own proper vocation, it will be right with the whole.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Those that are firm in their will mold the world to themselves.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Some people spend the day in complaining of a headache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives it.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Talents are nurtured best in solitude, But character on life's tempestuous seas!
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Nature has neither core nor skin: she's both at once outside and in.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Gray are all the theories, But green is the tree of life.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
When two men quarrel, who owns the cooler head is the more to blame.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The march of intellect, which licks all the world into shape, has even reached the devil.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
For precisely when concepts fail one,Words are found at the right time. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
To make something you have to be something.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
What in us the women leave uncultivated, children cultivate when we retain them near us.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It matters little whether a man be mathematically or philologically or artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Mere curiosity adds wings to every step.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
For those ashamed of him Cupid reserves the bitterest passions.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Our hands we open of our own free will, and the good flies, which we can never recall.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Our foibles are really what make us lovable.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
I hate all bungling as I do sin, but particularly bungling in politics, which leads to the misery and ruin of many thousands and millions of people.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It is equally a mistake to hold one's self too high, or to rate one's self too cheap.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
We amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Where there is much light, the shadows are deepest.[Ger., Wo viel Licht is, ist starker Schatten.] — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Nothing is true, but that which is simple.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Memory extends as far as our self-interest.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
When you praise someone you call yourself his equal.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The intelligent man finds everything laughable, the sensible man hardly anything.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
One alone does not help, but rather he who unites with many at the right moment.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The right man is the one who seizes the moment.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
He is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey nor to command in order to be something.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It is much easier to die than to bear a life of misery with fortitude.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Combine truth and invention for the sake of a closer approach to reality
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It is delivery that makes the orators success.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
He who is and remains true to himself and to others has the most attractive quality of the greatest talent.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
You accuse a woman of wavering affections, but don't blame her; she is just looking for a consistent man.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
There is no crime of which I cannot conceive myself guilty.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Music is so elevated that it is beyond the reach of intellect and there flows from it an influence which is all-potent, and which noone can explain.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Do you want to be like Goethe or any of those so-called geniuses who marry a nothing hausfrau?
— Nathaniel Branden
Power is neither male nor female.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Sound and sufficient reason falls, after all, to the share of but few men, and those few men exert their influence in silence.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Fools and wise-folk are alike harmless. It is the half-wise, and the half-foolish, who are the most dangerous.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.
— 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
Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Belief is not the beginning of knowledge- it is the end.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Goethe said there would be little left of him if he were to discard what he owed to others.
— Charlotte Saunders Cushman
A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe