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 highest of all sciences is the science of living.
Man errs as long as he strives.
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Only by renunciation can a life be formed.
Light, more light!
Architecture is frozen music.
The truly free man is he who can turn from a thing and go his own way.
Against the great superiority of another, there is no remedy but love.
The more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more difficult than to know oneself.
We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
The soul that sees beauty is itself beautiful.
If I love you, what does that matter to you!
There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
None but the lonely heart knows how to sing.
To understand one must know how to forget and not to remember.
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.
I love those who yearn for the impossible.
Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
Contemporaries of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).