"The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don't understand; no wonder they come to grief."
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Quote collection
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes (page 16 of 88)
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"The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety."
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"A reasonable man needs only to practice moderation to find happiness."
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"What one doesn't understand one doesn't possess."
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"Patriotism corrupts history."
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"Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity."
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"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different."
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"The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity."
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"Pain and pleasure, good and evil, come to us from unexpected sources. It is not there where we have gathered up our brightest hopes, that the dawn of happiness breaks. It is not there where we have glanced our eye with affright, that we find the deadliest gloom. What should this teach us? To bow to the great and only Source of light, and live humbly and with confiding resignation."
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"Personality is everything in art and poetry."
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"The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art."
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"A useless life is an early death. [Ger., Ein unnutz Leben ist ein fruher Tod.]"
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"I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be."
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"We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn't begrudge his son's talent."
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"Hope is the second soul of the unhappy."
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"When intelligent and sensible people despise knowledge in their old age, it is only because they have asked too much of it and of themselves."
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"Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal."
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"The beginning of faith is the beginning of fruitfulness; but the beginning of unbelief, however glittering, is empty."
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"For a strolling damsel a doubtful reputation bears."
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"He who is resolute conquers grief."
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