Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

There is strong shadow where there is much light.

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.

Sometimes I don't understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her!

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

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.

Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.

People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude towards the public.

Talent develops in solitude, character develops in the stream of life.

This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.

God help us — for art is long, and life so short.

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