Goethe Quotes

“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.”
― Goethe

“I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own”
― Goethe Wolfgang, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I treat my heart like a sick child and gratify its every fancy.”
― Goethe Wolfgang, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”
― Goethe

“Not like Homer would I write,
Not like Dante if I might,
Not like Shakespeare at his best,
Not like Goethe or the rest,
Like myself, however small,
Like myself, or not at all.”
― William Allingham, Blackberries

“If I wasn't a devil myself I'd give
Me up to the Devil this very minute.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

“Faustus, who embraced evil and shunned righteousness, became the foremost symbol of the misuse of free will, that sublime gift from God with its inherent opportunity to choose virtue and reject iniquity. “What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) - but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life of fleeting pleasure with no true peace? This was the blackest and most captivating tragedy of all, few could have remained indifferent to the growing intrigue of this individual who apparently shook hands with the devil and freely chose to descend to the molten, sulphuric chasm of Hell for all eternity for so little in exchange. It is a drama that continues to fascinate today as powerfully as when Faustus first disseminated his infamous card in the Heidelberg locale to the scandal of his generation. In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul be Damned for the World, Vol. 1

“... the vintage of history is forever repeating ~ same old vines, same old wines!”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul be Damned for the World, Vol. 2

“If I love you, is that any of your business?”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“How to please the public - that's the test,
But nowadays I find I'm in a fix;
I know they're not accustomed to the best,
But they've all read so much they know the tricks.
How can we give then something fresh and new
That's serious, but entertaining too?”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“The lord whose is the oracle at Delphoi neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows it by a sign.

The Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her.”
― Heraclitus

“„Was glänzt ist für den Augenblick geboren; Das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie und grün des Lebens goldner Baum”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“The actor's realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it is known, his is the most ephemeral. At least, this is said in conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral. From the point of view of Sirius, Goethe's works in ten thousand years will be dust and his name forgotten.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“If it were Hegel, I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“ Într-adevăr ştiu multe, dar aş vrea să ştiu totul. ”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, and the Urfaust

“When the sound and wholesome nature of man acts as an entirety, when he feels himself in the world as in a grand, beautiful, worthy and worthwhile whole, when this harmonious comfort affords him a pure, untrammeled delight: then the universe, if it could be sensible of itself, would shout for joy at having attained its goal and wonder at the pinnacle of its own essence and evolution. For what end is served by all the expenditure of suns and planets and moons, of stars and Milky Ways, of comets and nebula, of worlds evolving and passing away, if at last a happy man does not involuntarily rejoice in his existence?”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Art is bad when ‘you see the intent and get put off.’ (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself.
from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy”
― Joel Carmichael

“Upon the publication of Goethe’s epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward his drama was the rule by which all other Faust adaptations were measured. Goethe had eclipsed the earlier legends and became the undisputed authority on the subject of Faust in the eyes of the new Romantic generation. To deviate from his path would be nothing short of blasphemy.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul be Damned for the World, Vol. 2

“In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1

“Dandies, who – as you know - scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, The Crimson Curtain

“Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbart
The human power is revealed by poet
Il potere dell'umanità si rivela nel poeta”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Just as his sentimentalism is profoundly middle-class and plebeian, but his irrationalism reactionary, so his moral philosophy also contains an inner contradiction: on the one hand, it is saturated with strongly plebeian characteristics, but on the other, it contains the germ of a new aristocratism. The concept of the ‘beautiful soul’ presupposes the complete dissolution of kalo-kagathia and implies the perfect spiritualization of all human values, but it also implies an application of aesthetic criteria to morality and is bound up with the view that moral values are the gift of nature. It means the recognition of a nobility of soul to which everyone has a right by nature, but in which the place of irrational birthrights is taken by an equally irrational quality of moral genius. The way of Rousseau’s ‘spiritual beauty’ leads, on the one hand, to characters like Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, who is a saint in the guise of an epilectic and an idiot, on the other, to the ideal of individual moral perfection which knows no social responsibility and does not aspire to be socially useful. Goethe, the Olympian, who thinks of nothing but his own spiritual perfection, is a disciple of Rousseau just as much as the young freethinker who wrote Werther.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“Briefe gehören unter die wichtigsten Denkmäler, die der einzelne Mensch hinterlassen kann.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I am not like the God! That was a painful thrust;
I'm like the worm that burrows in the dust,
Who, as he makes of dust his meager meal,
Is crushed and buried by a wanderers heel
Is it not dust that stares from every rack
And narrows down this vaulting den?
This moth's world full of bric-a-brac
In which I live as in a pen?
Here I should find for what I care?
Should I read in a thousand books, maybe,
That men have always suffered everywhere,
Though now and then some man lived happily?-
Why, hollow skull, do you grin like a faun?
Save that your brain, like mine, once in dismay
Searched for light day, but foundered in the heavy dawn”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“I am not like the Gods! That was a painful thrust;
I'm like the worm that burrows in the dust,
Who, as he makes of dust his meager meal,
Is crushed and buried by a wanderers heel
Is it not dust that stares from every rack
And narrows down this vaulting den?
This moth's world full of bric-a-brac
In which I live as in a pen?
Here I should find for what I care?
Should I read in a thousand books, maybe,
That men have always suffered everywhere,
Though now and then some man lived happily?-
Why, hollow skull, do you grin like a faun?
Save that your brain, like mine, once in dismay
Searched for light day, but foundered in the heavy dawn”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back — concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe