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| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe born 1749 died 1832 was a renowned German statesman author and poet. |
Quotes by Johann Goethe
It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.
That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way as us.
You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me from your own life. May it all turn out to your happiness.
We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.
We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive.
Such is the frailty of man that even where he makes the truest and most forcible impression in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish.
A teacher, who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, or for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.
Intellect without firmness is craft and chicanery; and firmness without intellect is perverseness and obstinacy.
Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.
Everything we do has a result. But that which is right and prudent does not always lead to good, nor the contrary to what is bad.
The world is so full of simpletons and madmen, that one need not seek them in a madhouse.
Altogether, national hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.
It is not enough to take steps which may someday lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise.
You must conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.
All that is noble is in itself of a quiet nature, and appears to sleep until it is aroused and summoned forth by contrast.
They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless.
Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.
Of course I am a wanderer, a pilgrim upon this earth, but can you say that you are anything more?
We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.
Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.
There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.
Below are mainly one liner’s as many of Goethe’s quotes are succinct.
Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Women are silver dishes into which we put golden apples.
I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wants.
Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
God’s mill grinds slow, but sure.
I do not know myself and God forbid that I should.
Let a man do his duty and you will know instantly what he is worth.
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
Theory is gray, but the golden tree of life is green.
What we do not understand we do not possess.
Where there is much light there is also much shadow.
And finally this wonderful verse
Know'st thou the land where the lemon-trees bloom,
Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket’s gloom,
Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows,
And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?
