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
Ingratitude is always a kind of weakness. I have never known men of ability to be ungrateful.
Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.
To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible. It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years.
Certain faults are necessary to the individual if he is to exist.
Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy.
What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.
Hatred is active displeasure, envy passive. We need not wonder that envy turns to soon to hatred.
If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well.
Everything that we call Invention or Discovery in the higher sense of the word is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth, which, after a long course of silent cultivation, suddenly flashes out into fruitful knowledge.
Beauty can never really understand itself.
When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.
It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries--to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.
Thou tremblest before anticipated ills, and still bemoanest what thou never losest.
I always had an aversion to your apostles of freedom; each but sought for himself freedom to do what he liked.