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)
Superstition is the poetry of life.
A purpose is the eternal condition of all fruitful action.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
He who does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
To be is to do.
To do is to be.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend their lives in a circle, and it takes a lot of courage to break out of it.
The highest of all is to understand ourselves.
The only way to deal with the world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Nature has neither core nor shell; she is everything at once.
The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
None but the master can teach us what is right.
All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.
The greatest happiness of man is to be able to live in the present, without looking back to the past or forward to the future.
Character is formed in the stream of the world.
The highest wisdom is to know that we are nothing.
Only those who know how to suffer can understand.
The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, were they not revealed to us through the beautiful, would remain eternally hidden.
Joy and sorrow are the two great teachers of life.
Contemporaries of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).