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
I never believed in trying to do anything. Whatever I set out to do I found I had already accomplished.
There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies.
Blood is a very special juice.
Courage and modesty are the most unequivocal of virtues, for they are of a kind that hypocrisy cannot imitate; they too have this quality in common, that they are expressed by the same color....
For the nature of women is closely allied to art
How many years must a man do nothing, before he can at all know what is to be done and how to do it!
Man would not be the finest creature in the world if he were not too fine for it.
I make presents to the mother but think of the daughter.
Our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.
The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it.. but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.
The history of science is science itself; the history of the individual, the individual.
First let a man teach himself, and then he will be taught by others.
True observers of nature, although they may think differently, will still agree that everything that is, everything that is observable as a phenomenon, can only exhibit itself in one of two ways. It is either a primal polarity that is able to unify, or it is a primal unity that is able to divide. The operation of nature consists of splitting the united or uniting the divided; this is the eternal movement of systole and diastole of the heartbeat, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, act, and exist.
Know'st thou yesterday, its aim and reason? Work'st thou will today for worthier things? Then calmly wait the morrow's hidden season, And fear thou not, what hap soe'er it brings