Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

If you don't feel it, you'll never get it.

All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.

It's true that nothing in this world makes us so necessary to others as the affection we have for them.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.

Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

If you would create something,
you must be something.

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.

Leap and the net will appear.

We know accurately only when we know little; doubt grows with knowledge.

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