Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Whatever truths or fables you may find in a thousand books, it is all a tower of Babel unless love holds it together.

Anything you can do, or dream you do, begin it: boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Chi non conosce le lingue straniere non conosce nulla della propria.

Well, that's Philosophy I've read, And Law and Medicine, and I fear Theology, too, from A to Z; Hard studies all, that have cost me dear. And so I sit, poor silly man No wiser now than when I began.

I could be living the best and happiest of lives if only I were not a fool.

To end the greatest work designed, A thousand hands need but one mind.

Poetry is not simply a fashion of expression: it is the form of expression absolutely required by a certain class of ideas. Poetry, indeed, may be distinguished from Prose by the single circumstance, that it is the utterance of whatever in man cannot be perfectly uttered in any other than a rhythmical form: it is useless to say that the naked meaning is independent of the form: on the contrary, the form contributes essentially to the fullness of the meaning.

Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason: truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.

Du, Erde, warst auch diese Nacht beständig Und atmest neu erquickt zu meinen Füßert, Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben, Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschließen, Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben. This night, thou, Earth! hast also stood unshaken, And now thou breathest new-refreshed before me, And now beginnest, all thy gladness granting, A vigorous resolution to restore me, To seek that highest life for which I'm panting.

Du bist am Ende was du bist.

But you will never know another's heart, unless you are prepared to give yours too.

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever be decried by the world as drunken or insane.

The Beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome.

When any distress or terror surprises us in the midst of our amusements, it naturally makes a deeper impression than at other times, either because the contrast makes us more keenly susceptible, or rather perhaps because our senses are then more open to impressions, and the shock is consequently stronger.

I hope we shall get on together, you and I; I've come to cheer you up - That's why I'm dressed up like an aristocrat In a fine red coat with golden stitches, A stiff silk cape on top of that, A long sharp dagger in my breeches, And a cockerel's feather in my hat. Take my advice - if I were you, I'd get an outfit like this too; Then you'd be well equipped to see Just how exciting life can be.

Once more I am a wanderer, a pilgrim, through the world. But what else are you?

By Fortune's adverse buffets overborne To solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn, And not in utter loneliness to live, Myself at last did to the Devil give!

THE WITCH. [dancing]. O I shall lose my wits, I fear, Do I, again, see Squire Satan here! MEPHISTOPHELES. Woman, the name offends my ear! THE WITCH. Why so? What has it done to you? MEPHISTOPHELES. It has long since to fable-books been banished; But men are none the better for it; true, The wicked one, but not the wicked ones, has vanished.

It is much easier to recognise error than to find truth; for error lies on the surface and may be overcome; but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to every one.

Blue: as yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful - but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.

A rainbow which lasts for a quarter of an hour is looked at no longer.