Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.

What's it to you if I love you?

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

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.

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

He who moves not forward, goes backward.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

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

Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment.

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!

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

You ask which form of government is the best? Whichever teaches us to govern ourselves.

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.

Der umgang mit frauen ist das element guter sitten.

A true German can't stand the French,<br