Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann WolfgangGoethetə/; German: ; 28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer and statesman. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him exist...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 August 1749
CountryGermany
To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
Misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than malice and wickedness.
It is better to do the smallest thing in the world than to hold half an hour to be too small a thing.
People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude towards the public.
A word spoken is a terrible thing when it suddenly utters what the heart has long allowed.
two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.
It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it.
The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.
Basic characteristics of an individual organism: to divide, to unite, to merge into the universal, to abide in the particular, to transform itself, to define itself, and as living things tend to appear under a thousand conditions, to arise and vanish, to solidify and melt, to freeze and flow, to expand and contract. Since these effects occur together, any or all may occur at the same moment.
I wait for the morning of my tears
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.
Faust: Who holds the devil, let him hold him well, He hardly will be caught a second time.
In the colorful reflection we have what is life.