Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you want to get pleasure out of life, you must attach value to the world.

The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist.

I have learned much from disease which life could have never taught me anywhere else.

Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling.

It is one of Heaven's best gifts to hold such a dear creature in one's arms.

My days are as happy as those reserved by God for his elect; and whatever be my fate hereafter, I can never say that I have not tasted joy— the purest joy of life.

The fine emotions whence our lives we mold Lie in the earthly tumult dumb and cold.

Sing it not in mournful numbers.

At the end of life thoughts hitherto impossible come to the collected mind, like good spirits which let themselves down from the shining heights of the past.

There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.

Every individual who is not creative has a negative, narrow, exclusive taste and succeeds in depriving creative being of its energy and life.

And step by step, along the path of life, There's nothing true but Heaven.

I will say with Lorenzo de Medici that those who do not hope for another life are always dead to this one.

The highest happiness, the purest joys of life, wear out at last.

Life is but a preparation for what there is to come.

What is the true test of character unless it be its progressive development in the bustle and turmoil, in the action and reaction of daily life.

Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.

Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.

The older we get the more we must limit ourselves if we wish to be active.

Rejoice that you have still have a long time to live, before the thought comes to you that there is nothing more in the world to see.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

Very few people love others for what they are; rather, they love what they lend them, their own selves, their own idea of them.