Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Look at a man the way he is and he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be.

The man of understanding finds everything laughable.

A man's foibles are what makes him lovable.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

The greatest joy of a thinking man is to have searched the explored and to quietly revere the unexplored.

A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.

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

Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.

Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art.

Beware of a man of one book.

Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic

Few men have imagination enough for reality.

A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.

Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.

As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd.

I call architecture frozen music.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

God help me... that I be not as those are who spend the day in complaining of headache, and the night in drinking the wine which gives the headache!

Our passions are true phœnixes: as the old burn out, the new straight rise up out of the ashes.

Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it.

Someone criticized an elderly man for wooing young women. He replied that that was the only way to rejuvenation, which was, afterall, everybody's wish.

For the nature of a women is closely allied to art. [Ger., Denn das Naturell der Frauen Ist so nah mit Kunst verwandt.]

Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.