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)
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
If you want to know yourself, just look how others do it; if you want to understand others, look into your own heart.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Everything is both simpler than we can imagine, and more complicated than we can conceive.
The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
The only way to do great work is to love what you do.
In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all depends on perseverance.
He who possesses art is possessed by it.
The artist is the master of his life; he who does not possess his life does not possess his art.
Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always the same, she never tells lies.
Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.
In art the best is good enough.
One should not only study a poet's works as art, but also as a force of nature.
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
I have always found that the less we loved and esteemed others, the more we thought of ourselves.
The greatest happiness for the thinking man is to have fathomed the fathomable, and to quietly revere the unfathomable.
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
Socrates was a great Greek philosopher who taught that the unexamined life is not worth living.
To be loved is to be fortunate.
Contemporaries of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).