Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer and was also a polymath (Like Aristotle, Archimedes, Leo Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin among others). Goethe is considered by many to be the most important writer in the German language and one of the most important thinkers in Western culture. Goethe’s works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, and science. He is most well knwon for the two-part drama Faust. Goethealso wrote some famous poems like the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. His other great masterpiece is the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Here are some of our favorite quotes by Wolfgang Goethe:
Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.
The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don’t understand; no wonder they come to grief.
Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
A person hears only what they understand.
Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.
No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.
All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.
A useless life is an early death.
Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.
Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.
Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.
Nothing is to be rated higher than the value of the day.
If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.
There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.
There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.
Doubt grows with knowledge.
A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
The deed is everything, the glory is naught.
Divide and rule, the politician cries; unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.
The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.
We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.
The world remains ever the same.
What by a straight path cannot be reached by crooked ways is never won.
What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.
The unnatural, that too is natural.
The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.
The human mind will not be confined to any limits.
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
My peace is gone, my heart is heavy.
Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.
Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.
I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.
I will listen to anyone’s convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.
We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.
Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.
There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.
To rule is easy, to govern difficult.
Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.
What is my life if I am no longer useful to others.
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