"Reality surpasses imagination; and we see, breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of sleep."
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Quote collection
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes (page 34 of 88)
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"A great deal may be done by severity, more by love, but most by clear discernment and impartial justice."
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"And those whom once my song had cheered and gladdened, If still they live, rove through the world now saddened."
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"Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight."
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"The art of governing is a great metier, requiring the whole man, and it is therefore not well for a ruler to have too strong tendencies for other affairs."
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"The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing."
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"Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste."
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"Religion is not in want of art; it rests on its own majesty."
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"Merely to breathe freely does not mean to live."
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"True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and, despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine."
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"It is better to be deceived by one's friends than to deceive them."
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"He who has art and science also has religion, but those who do not have them better have religion."
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"Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story."
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"It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once."
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"Truth is a torch, but a huge one, and so it is only with blinking eyes what we all of us try to get past it, in actual terror of being burnt."
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"Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy, must we also rob one another of the pleasures that any heart may permit itself now and then? And name me a person who in a bad mood will be decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him. Is it not rather an inner dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves that is always associated with envy aggravated by foolish conceit? We see people happy and not made happy by us, and that is unbearable."
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"After fifteen minutes nobody looks at a rainbow."
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"Ambition and love are the wings of great actions."
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"Beautiful is greater than Good, for it includes the Good."
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"Hatred is active displeasure, envy passive. We need not wonder that envy turns to soon to hatred."
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