Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

“There is nothing new on earth / For a person who lives long and experiences much. / In my years of youthful wandering / I have seen crystallized people.”

“Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.”

“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.”

“What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.”

“The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.”

“Microscopes and telescopes really confuse our minds.”

“What makes people happy is activity; changing evil itself into good by power, working in a God like manner.”

“Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen. Spricht man zu ihnen, so übersetzen sie alles in ihre eigene Sprache, und so wird es alsobald etwas ganz anderes. Mathematicians are a kind of Frenchmen. Whenever you say anything or talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and right away it is something completely different.”

“The further one advances in experience, the closer one comes to the unfathomable; the more one learns to utilize experience, the more one recognizes that the unfathomable is of no practical value.”

“Enthusiasm is of the greatest value, so long as we are not carried away by it.”

“Let there be truth between us.”

“Whoever gives himself up to solitude, Ah! he is soon alone.”

“A man's errors are what make him amiable.”

“The most foolish of all errors is for clever young men to believe that they forfeit their originality in recognizing a truth which has already been recognized by others.”

“Opponents fancy they refute us when they repeat their own opinion and pay no attention to ours.”

“First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.”

“Rest not. Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.”

“I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it”

“Fret not over the irretrievable, but ever act as if thy life were just begun.”

“When I make a mistake everyone can see it, but not when I lie.”

“I am what I am, so take me as I am!.”

“The use of a thing is only a part of its significance. To know anything thoroughly, to have the full command of it in all its appliances, we must study it on its own account, independently of any special application.”

“What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes.”

“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”

“Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent. I therefore show you only the best works; and when you are grounded in these, you will have a standard for the rest, which you will know how to value, without overrating them.”