"Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes (page 61 of 88)
1.7K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The realization of the self is only possible if one is productive, if one can give birth to one's own potentialities."
Read quote
3 likes
"Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves."
Read quote
3 likes
"To know where a thing is we must have found it."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors."
Read quote
3 likes
"Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?"
Read quote
3 likes
"Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to that path which nature has marked out for him."
Read quote
3 likes
"For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter."
Read quote
3 likes
"People will allow their faults to be shown them; they will let themselves be punished for them; they will patiently endure many things because of them; they only become impatient when they have to lay them aside."
Read quote
3 likes
"The people rate strength before everything."
Read quote
3 likes
"We who didn't inherit political power nor are made to acquire riches like nothing better than that which expands and solidifies the power of the spirit."
Read quote
3 likes
"Those only obtain love, for the most part, who seek it not."
Read quote
3 likes
"If you are to accomplish all that one demands of you, you must overestimate your own worth."
Read quote
3 likes
"Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is a misfortune to pass at once from observation to conclusion, and to regard both as of equal value; but it befalls many a student."
Read quote
3 likes
"Love has the tendency of pressing together all the lights - all the rays emitted from the beloved object by the burning-glass of fantasy, - into one focus, and making of them one radiant sun without any spots."
Read quote
3 likes
"Tell me, how do you cope so calmly With crazy youth's arrogant way? Indeed, youth would be insufferable, Had I myself not also been insufferable."
Read quote
3 likes
"I hold to faith in the divine love - which, so many years ago for a brief moment in a little corner of the earth, walked about as a man bearing the name of Jesus Christ - as the foundation on which alone my happiness rests."
Read quote
3 likes
"Let him who believes in immortality enjoy his happiness in silence; he has no reason to give himself airs about it."
Read quote
3 likes
"How many years you have to keep on doing, until you know what to do and how to do!"
Read quote
3 likes