Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

“To the world you might be one person, but to one person, you might be the world. Kindness is the golden chain by which our world is bound together.”

“After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.”

“For the nature of women is closely allied to art”

“Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.”

“Before you can do something, you must first be something.”

“Blood is a very special juice.”

“Such is the frailty of man that even where he makes the truest and most forcible impression in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish.”

“The little man is still a man.”

“When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.”

“He who enjoys doing and enjoys what he has done is happy.”

“What is part of you, you cannot get rid of, even if you were to throw it away.”

“God made man simple, but how he changed and got complicated is hard to say.”

“If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well.”

“What you desire when young, you have in abundance when old.”

“A person places themselves on a level with the ones they praise.”

“He who is resolute conquers grief.”

“We are forced to participate in the games of life before we can possibly learn how to use the options in the rules governing them.”

“Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.”

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

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

“When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.”

“Those who make use of devotion as a means and end generally are hypocrites.”

“What right those who govern have to govern they don't question, they just govern. Whether the people have a right to depose them that doesn't concern them. All they are concerned with is that the people will not be tempted to depose them.”

“One needs only to get old to become milder; I don't see anyone make a mistake I hadn't also made.”

“Whoever aspiring, struggles on, for him there is salvation.”