"One usually thinks people to be more dangerous than they are."
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Quote collection
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes (page 80 of 88)
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"One spares old people just as one spares children."
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"Pity on the person who has become accustomed to seeing in necessity something arbitrary, who ascribes to the arbitrary some sort of reason, and even claims that following that sort of reason has religious value."
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"That we understand something perfectly, that we accomplish something better than anyone else around us, that is what matters."
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"Nature is so perfect that the Trinity couldn't have fashioned her any more perfect. She is an organ on which our Lord plays and the devil works the bellows."
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"So much has already been said about Shakespeare that there doesn't seem to be anything more to say; yet it is the quality of the spirit that it forever stimulates the spirit."
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"Hatred is partial, but love is still more so."
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"There is no way to face the great advantages of another person than through love."
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"For that is love's nature that it lays claim to exclusive right and that all other claims are nil."
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"Love, whose power youth feels, is not suitable for the elderly, just as little as anything that presupposes productivity. It is rare that productivity lasts through the years."
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"And we went our separate ways without having understood each other. As in this world nobody understands the other easily."
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"Normally, the sciences distance themselves from life and the return to it via a detour."
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"Everything in science depends on what one calls an aperçu, on becoming aware of what is at the bottom of the phenomena. Such becoming aware is infinitely fertile."
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"Association with women is the basis of good manners."
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"Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination."
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"Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of beingcreated so as to understand them to some degree."
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"Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them."
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"It would not be worth your while to reach the age of seventy if all the wisdom of the world were to be foolishness before God."
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"The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses."
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"If you have science and art, You also have religion; But if you don't have them, You better have religion."
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