Top 1758 Quotes & Sayings by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Page 29

Let your trouble be Light will follow dark Though the heaven falls You may hear the lark.

So dear night the half of life is, And the fairest half indeed.

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.

Still this planet's soil for noble deeds grants scope abounding.

Like the star that shines afar, Without haste and without rest, Let each one wheel with steady sway Round the task that rules the day, And do their best.

After fifteen minutes nobody looks at a rainbow.

Everything perfect in its kind has to transcend its own kind, it must become something different and incomparable. In some notes the nightingale is still a bird; then it rises above its class and seems to suggest to every winged creature what singing is truly like.

What dazzles, for the moment spends its spirit; Whats genuine, shall posterity inherit.

He who serves the public is a poor animal; he worries himself to death and no one thanks him for it.

Neither art thou the man to catch the fiend and hold him! [Ger., Du bist noch nicht der Mann den Teufel festzuhalten.

Do thine own task, and be therewith content.

For what one has in black and white, One can carry home in comfort.

Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removedd when the building is completed. They are indispensable to the worker; but the worker must not mistake the scaffolding for the building.

Mastery is often taken for egotism.

Power is neither male nor female.

From desire I plunge to its fulfilment, where I long once more for desire.

Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.

He who possesses science and art, Possesses religion as well; He who possesses neither of these, Had better have religion.

A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.

I had rather be Mercury, the smallest among seven [planets], revolving round the sun, than the first among five [moons] revolving round Saturn.

The church alone beyond all question Has for ill-gotten goods the right digestion.

Yes, I have finally arrived to this Capital of the World! I now see all the dreams of my youth coming to life... Only in Rome is it possible to understand Rome.

When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.

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

A man avails himself of the truth so long as it is serviceable; but he seizes on what is false with a passionate eloquence as soon as he can make a momentary use of it.

Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.

To every one [Nature] appears in a form of his own. She hides herself in a thousand names and terms, and is always the same.

There is no greater consolation for mediocrity than that the genius is not immortal.

Beauty can never really understand itself.

He who is wise puts aside all claims which may dissipate his attention, and confining himself to one branch excels in that.

We find from experience that yellow excites a warm and agreeable impression.... The eye is gladdened, the heart expanded and cheered, a glow seems at once to breathe toward us.

I come more and more to the conclusion that one must take the side of the minority which is always the more intelligent one.

If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.

A man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible; otherwise he would not try to fathom it.

Deny yourself! You must deny yourself! That is the song that never ends.

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.

I always had an aversion to your apostles of freedom; each but sought for himself freedom to do what he liked.

Life is but a preparation for what there is to come.

If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

I am the Spirit that denies.

It is a very hard and troublesome thing to dispose of whole, half, and quarter-mistakes; to sift them and assign the portion of truth to its proper place.

It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries--to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.

The longer I live, the more it grieves me to see man, who occupies his supreme place for the very purpose of imposing his will upon nature, and freeing himself and his from an outrageous necessity--to see him taken up with some false notion, and doing just the opposite of what he wants to do; and then, because the whole bent of his mind is spoilt, bungling miserably over everything.

It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

Over the trackless past, somewhere, Lie the lost days of our tropic youth, Only regained by faith and prayer, Only recalled by prayer and plaint, Each lost day has its patron saint!

It is not always needful for truth to take a definite shape; it is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony; if it is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell, grave and kindly.

Certain faults are necessary to the individual if he is to exist.

What you have inherited from your forefathers, it takes work to make it your own.

Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy.

Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.

If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.

Everything that we call Invention or Discovery in the higher sense of the word is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth, which, after a long course of silent cultivation, suddenly flashes out into fruitful knowledge.

Who enslaves another's manhood with weak human power alone, Lays a heavier yoke of bondage thoughtlessly upon his own.

I hate every violent overthrow, because as much is destroyed as is gained by it.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

The theater has often been at variance with the pulpit; they ought not to quarrel. How much is it to be wished that in both the celebration of nature and of God were intrusted to none but men of noble minds.

Lose this day loitering 'Twill be the same old story, Tomorrow and the next, Even more dilatory. Whatever you would do, Or dream of doing, begin it! Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it. Begin it now.

There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again.