The voices / 207 fragments

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Archive entries

01Undated

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

02Undated

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

03Undated

I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

04Undated

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

05Undated

This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

06Undated

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

07Undated

If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

08Undated

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

09Undated

Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

10Undated

He who moves not forward, goes backward.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

11Undated

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

12Undated

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

13Undated

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

14Undated

What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

15Undated

Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

16Undated

The way you see people is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is what they become.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

17Undated

Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopaedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

18Undated

Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

19Undated

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

20Undated

Behaviour is a mirror in which every one displays his own image.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

21Undated

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

22Undated

A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

23Undated

...nothing is more dangerous than solitude: there our imagination, always disposed to rise, taking a new flight on the wings of fancy, pictures to us a chain of beings of whom we seem the most inferior. All things appear greater than they really are, and all seem superior to us. This operation of the mind is quite natural: we so continually feel our own imperfections, and fancy we perceive in others the qualities we do not possess, attributing to them also all that we enjoy ourselves, that by this process we form the idea of a perfect, happy man,—a man, however, who only exists in our own imagination.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote

24Undated

A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / quote