Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Some people spend the day in complaining of a headache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives it.

Nature! We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her. Variant: NATURE! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her.

The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

Assuredly there is no more lovely worship of God than that for which no image is required, but which springs up in our breast spontaneously when nature speaks to the soul, and the soul speaks to nature face to face.

Nature is the living, visible garment of God.

Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap.

Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

All men would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself.

Chess is the touchstone of intellect.

If the mass of people hesitate to act, strike with swiftly and with boldness, the brave heart that understands and seizes opportunity can everything.

If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.

Energy will do anything that can be done in the world; and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two-legged animal a man without it.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

All truths are old, and all that we have to do is recognize and utter them anew.

The thought of death leaves me in perfect peace, for I have a firm conviction that our spirit is a being of indestructible nature; it works on from eternity to eternity, it is like the sun, which though it seems to set to our mortal eyes, does not really set, but shines on perpetually.

Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and the we'll need no other light.

Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.

By nature we have no defect that could not become a strength, no strength that could not become a defect.

Every second is of infinite value.

To quit smoking, you must first want to quit, but then you must also do the quitting