Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Aptitudes are assumed, they should become accomplishments. That is the purpose of all education.

We are not all equal, nor can we be so.

Legislators and revolutionaries who promise both equality and liberty are visionaries and charlatans.

People can only live with their equals, and not even with them; for in the long run they cannot tolerate that someone is their equal.

Excellence is rarely found, more rarely valued.

[W]hat counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it expression, which sounds little but is in fact a great deal.

Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united.

This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.

The beginning of faith is the beginning of fruitfulness; but the beginning of unbelief, however glittering, is empty.

Your messages I hear, but faith has not been given; The dearest child of Faith is Miracle.

We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn't begrudge his son's talent.

What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.

That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.

Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned.

Humans fear reason, but they ought to fear stupidity- for reason can be hard, but stupidity can be fatal.

Art is in itself noble; that is why the artist has no fear of what is common. This, indeed, is already ennobled when he takes it up.

One usually thinks people to be more dangerous than they are.

Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

There would be far less suffering in the world if human beings-God knows why they are made like this-did not use their imaginations so busily in recalling the memories of past misfortunes, instead of trying to bear an indifferent present.

To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed that can make life a garden.

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.