Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

That I be not as those are who spend the day in complaining of headache and the night in drinking the wine which gives the headache!

Which government is the best? The one that teaches us to govern ourselves.

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

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.

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.

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.

What I possess, seems far away to me, and what is gone becomes reality.

The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.

The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity - a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.

Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling.

A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him...but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.

It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."

Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.

Our earthly ball a peopled garden.

How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to.

All is born of water; all is sustained by water.

Commonplaceness, the surrender to the average, that good which is not bad but still the enemy of the best - That is our besetting danger.

The society of women is the element of good manners.

Only the soul that loves is happy

Most man only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.