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)
Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at.
To rule is easy, to govern difficult.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
He is dead in this world who has no belief in another.
The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
Contemporaries of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).