Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you would create something, you must be something.

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.

We know accurately only when we know little; doubt grows with knowledge.

Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.

Here too it's masquerade, I find: As everywhere, the dance of mind. I grasped a lovely masked procession, And caught things from a horror show… I'd gladly settle for a false impression, If it would last a little longer, though.

To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

Doubt can only be removed by action.

The intelligent man finds everything laughable, the sensible man hardly anything.

Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

I laugh at my heart, and do its will.

Faust: Who holds the devil, let him hold him well, He hardly will be caught a second time.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

Once I blazed across the sky, Leaving trails of flame; I fell to earth, and here I lie - Who'll help me up again? -A Shooting Star

Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own.

We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.

What a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it!

I am the spirit that negates. And rightly so, for all that comes to be Deserves to perish wretchedly; 'Twere better nothing would begin. Thus everything that that your terms, sin, Destruction, evil represent— That is my proper element.

Oblivion is full of people who allow the opinions of others to overrule their belief in themselves.

Was ich weiß, kann jeder wissen. Mein Herz hab' ich allein.

What I possess, seems far away to me, and what is gone becomes reality.