Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence—this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

On all the peaks lies peace.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

Once a man's thirty, he's already old,He is indeed as good as dead.It's best to kill him right away.

If you start to think about your physical or moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.

Age does not make us childish, as they say.It only finds us true children still.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

Every second is of infinite value.

[History is a] mixture of error and violence.

The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross.

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

Seeking with the soul the land of the Greeks.

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

The deed is everything, the glory naught.

I am the Spirit that always denies!

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

Character, in great and little things, means carrying through what you feel able to do.

If you inquire what the people are like here,I must answer, "The same as everywhere!"

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.