Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"We really learn only from those books that we cannot judge. The author of a book that we were able to judge would have to learn from us."
181 Quotes
"We really learn only from those books that we cannot judge. The author of a book that we were able to judge would have to learn from us."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The limits of my language are the limits of my universe."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Then indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting over lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"What you feed in yourself that grows."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Music is either sacred or profane. What is sacred accords completely with its nobility, and this is where music most immediately influences life; such influence remains unchanged at all times and in every epoch. Profane music should be altogether cheerful. Music of a kind that mixes the sacred with the profane is godless and shoddy music wich goes in for expressing feeble, wretched, deplorable feelings, and is just insipid. For it is not serious enough to be sacred and it lacks the chief quality of the opposite kind: cheerfulness."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Colors are light's suffering and joy"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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