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)
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
To see a thing as it is, we must see it as it is not.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
He who moves not forward, goes backward.
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Behavior is a mirror in which everyone displays his image.
To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.
The deed is everything, the glory nothing.
One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.
Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
By seeking and blundering we learn.
Everything is hard before it is easy.
If I love you, what business is it of yours?
There is strong shadow where there is much light.
One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for old age brings with it its own defects.
It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.
The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.
Contemporaries of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).