Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Doubt can only be removed by action.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.

To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.

Here too it’s masquerade, I find:
As everywhere, the dance of mind.
I grasped a lovely masked procession,
And caught things from a horror show…
I’d gladly settle for a false impression,
If it would last a little longer, though.

Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest.

Remember to live.

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

The intelligent man finds everything laughable, the sensible man hardly anything.

The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

Faust: Who holds the devil, let him hold him well,
He hardly will be caught a second time.