Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.

Der thörigste von allen Irrthümern ist, wenn junge gute Köpfe glauben, ihre Originalität zu verlieren, indem sie das Wahre anerkennen, was von andern schon anerkannt worden.

We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.

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

I hold to faith in the divine love — which, so many years ago for a brief moment in a little corner of the earth, walked about as a man bearing the name of Jesus Christ — as the foundation on which alone my happiness rests.

Nothing is more dangerous than solitude.

There is strong shadow where there is much light.

from desire I rush to satisfaction; from satisfaction I leap to desire.

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

Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint! Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht.

Modern poets put a lot of water into their ink.

Tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are; if I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you.

Everything is hard before it is easy

Must it ever be thus-that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of nature, overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a demon which perpetually pursues and harrasses me.

Zur Farbenlehre, Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre (1810), Frankfurt am Main, 1991, Seite 666.