Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

I see my discourse leaves you cold;
Dear kids, I do not take offense;
Recall: the Devil, he is old,
Grow old yourselves, and he'll make sense!

Everything that liberates our mind without at the same time imparting self-control is pernicious.

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.

I was oppressed with the sensations I then felt; I sunk under the weight of them.

I'm sorry for people who make a great to-do about the transitory nature of things and get lost in meditations of earthly nothingness. Surely we are here precisely so as to turn what passes into something that endures; but this is possible only if you can appreciate both.

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

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Doubt can only be removed by action.

I have by no means an aversion to things Indian, but I am afraid of them, for they draw my imagination into the formless and the diffuse against which I have to guard myself more than ever before.

What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.

Is it so big a mystery what god and man and world are? No! but nobody knows how to solve it so the mystery hangs on.

It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it.

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

Much there is I can stand. Most things not easy to suffer
I bear with quiet resolve, just as a God commands it.
Only a few things I find as repugnant as snakes and poison.
These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs and garlic and Christ.

What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?