Quotes from Johann von Goethe

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstood others.

Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action.

One man's word is no man's word we should quietly hear both sides.

Our friends show us what we can do our enemies teach us what we must do.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life

That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us.

The beginning of faith is the beginning of fruitfulness but the beginning of unbelief, however glittering, is empty.

The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.

The ground that a good man treads is hallowed.

The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

The man of understanding finds everything laughable.

The man who acts never has any conscience no one has any conscience but the man who thinks.

The phrases that men hear or repeat continually, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.

The society of women is the element of good manners.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit - this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

There is a courtesy of the heart it is allied to love. From it springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.

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

To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed

To live as one likes is plebian the noble man aspires to order and law.

Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

What government is the best -- That which teaches us to govern ourselves.

What is not fully understood is not possessed.