Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopaedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.

It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being... He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instil his strength into the invalid by whose bedside he is seated.

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.

They should be ashamed of themselves, all these sober people!

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

Lose the day loitering, 'twill be the same story
To-morrow, and the next more dilatory,
For indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute!
What you can do, or think you can, begin it!
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated;
Begin it, and the work will be completed.

‎It has ever been my fate to give pain to those whose happiness I should have promoted.

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they find to laugh at.

We amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The finished man, you know, is difficult to please;
a growing mind will ever show you gratitude. — Faust 1, lines 182-3

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

An unused life is an early death.

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.

The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.