Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Germany's greatest writer, Faust
Most quoted
"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered with books. The books are written in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it dimly comprehends but does not understand."
— from Conversations with Eckermann
"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint... but in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices."
— from Attributed (often misattributed to C.S. Lewis, but reflects a similar sentiment found in Goethe's critiques of bureaucracy and detached evil)
"The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it."
— from Elective Affinities, 1809
All quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (267)
Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult of all.
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is. When we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.
Where there is much light, the shadows are deeper.
Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.
You can't be anything you want to be. You can be everything you are.
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
One always has time enough, if one will but apply it well.
To be is to be in motion, to be in motion is to be in time, to be in time is to be in change, to be in change is to be in becoming, to be in becoming is to be in life.
The highest human happiness is to have made the end of your life the beginning of your life.
He who cannot give himself to the moment, cannot give himself to eternity.
One must be something, in order to do something.
The human race is a race of beings who are always in search of something, and who are never satisfied with what they find.
The greatest evil is not death, but a life without meaning.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Man is born to live and not to prepare for life.
A man's errors are his portals of discovery.
The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, were they not revealed to us through the beautiful, would forever remain hidden.
The human soul is like water: it comes from heaven, it rises to heaven, and it must return to heaven.
Contemporaries of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).