A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[W]hat counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it expression, which sounds little but is in fact a great deal. — © Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[W]hat counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it expression, which sounds little but is in fact a great deal.
The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.
Everything you say; every thought you entertain; and everything you do has a direction, which serves as an advance or a retreat in respect to your pursuit of excellence. Everything, regardless of size or intent, has bottom-line consequences; therefore, everything counts - this is the golden rule of excellence.
There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.
You give all your life to doing this one thing. It sounds grim, it sounds frightening - it isn't - it has a great gaiety at times and a great wonder.
Though the eye is small, the soul which sees through it is greater and vaster than all the things which it perceives. In fact, it is so great that it includes all objects, however large or numerous, within itself. For it is not so much that you are within the cosmos as that the cosmos is within you.
It is often better to have a great deal of harm happen to one than a little; a great deal may rouse you to remove what a little will only accustom you to endure.
Trying to compromise EXCELLENCE, is like trying to let a little bit of air out of a balloon with a hat pin.
Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas
My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
Excellence costs a great deal.
There is less misery in being cheated than in that kind of wisdom which perceives, or thinks it perceives, that all mankind are cheats.
I think I mainly climb mountains because I get a great deal of enjoyment out of it. I never attempt to analyze these things too thoroughly, but I think that all mountaineers do get a great deal of satisfaction out of overcoming some challenge which they think is very difficult for them, or which perhaps may be a little dangerous.
There's an expression in Yiddish, which is "der gelernte naar" - a "learned fool." You can know a great deal, you can have a Ph.D., and you can still be a total idiot.
If a human being dreams a great dream, dares to love somebody; if a human being dares to be Martin King, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Theresa, or Malcolm X; if a human being dares to be bigger than the condition into which she or he was born-it means so can you. And so you can try to stretch, stretch, stretch yourself so you can internalize, 'Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.' That's one thing I'm learning.
Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
We listen too much to the telephone and we listen too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound, perhaps, but soothing. Everybody should have his personal sounds to listen for-sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive, or quiet and calm... As a matter of fact, one of the greatest sounds of them all-and to me it is a sound-is utter, complete silence.
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