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
Very few people love others for what they are; rather, they love what they lend them, their own selves, their own idea of them.
Thus one can observe that those who proclaim piety as their goal and purpose usually turn into hypocrites.
We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.
Superstition belongs to the essence of mankind and takes refuge, when one thinks one has suppressed it completely, in the strangest nooks and crannies; once it is safely ensconced there, it suddenly reappears.
One criticizes the English for carrying their teapots wherever they go, even lugging them up Mount Etna. But doesn't every nationhave its teapot, in which, even when traveling, it brews the dried bundles of herbs brought from home?
Tolerance should really be only a temporary attitude; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to offend.
We can most safely achieve truly universal tolerance when we respect that which is characteristic in the individual and in nations, clinging, though, to the conviction that the truly meritorious is unique by belonging to all of mankind.
It doesn't behoove elderly persons to follow fashion in their thinking nor in the way they dress.
Someone criticized an elderly man for wooing young women. He replied that that was the only way to rejuvenation, which was, afterall, everybody's wish.
One needs only to get old to become milder; I don't see anyone make a mistake I hadn't also made.
As soon as you are in a social setting, you better take away the key to the lock of your heart and pocket it; those who leave thekey in the lock are fools.
New inventions can and will be made; however, nothing new can be thought of that concerns moral man. Everything has already been thought and said which at best we can express in different forms and give new expressions to.
For usually people resist as long as they can to dismiss the fool they harbor in their bosom, they resist to confess a major mistake or to admit a truth that makes them despair.
One can't dull a project better than by discussing it repeatedly.