Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We're really up against it, we poor women: A bachelor's a hard thing to convert

When toward the Devil's Hose we tread, Woman's a thousand steps behind. [Ger., Denn geht es zu des Bosen Haus Das Weib hat tausend Schritt voraus.]

Association with women is the basis of good manners.

Women are silver dishes into which we put golden apples.

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

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

An unused life is an early death.

He who has a task to perform must know how to take sides, or he is quite unworthy of it.

If you modestly enjoy your fame you are not unworthy to rank with the holy.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

He who moves not forward, goes backward.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!

Properly speaking, such work is never finished; one must declare it so when, according to time and circumstances, one has done one's best.

People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end.

Know'st thou yesterday, its aim and reason? Work'st thou will today for worthier things? Then calmly wait the morrow's hidden season, And fear thou not, what hap soe'er it brings

If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost.

To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

What you have inherited from your forefathers, it takes work to make it your own.

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

Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.