Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

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"We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us."

"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."

"If you modestly enjoy your fame you are not unworthy to rank with the holy."

"If any many wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul."

"Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess."

"One ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and , if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."

"All things are only transitory."

"I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should."

"If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own."

"It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed."

"Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires."

"Age merely shows what children we remain."

"Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes."

"We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others."

"The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them."

"People have a peculiar pleasure in making converts, that is, in causing others to enjoy what they enjoy, thus finding their own likeness represented and reflected back to them."

"A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait."

"The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection."

"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."

"Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him."