Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(1749 - 1832) German author

• "As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live."

• "When a man stops to ponder his physical or moral condition, he generally finds he is ill."

• "Only when we know little do we know anything; doubt grows with knowledge."

• "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

• "Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one."

• "Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong"
  • Also translated as: " Mistrust all in whom the desire to punish is imperative"
  • Source: Unknown
  • (Similar statements have definitely been made by Nietzsche, and attributed to Dostoevsky))

• "Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must."

• "Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity."

• "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 any man 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."

• "Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable."

• "The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit - this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden."

• "Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."

• "Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow."

• "He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home."

• "There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."

• "We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."

• "If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that."

• "Even the lowliest, provided he is whole, can be happy, and in his own way, perfect."

• "The man is born with a talent which he has meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it."

• "The deed is everything, the glory naught."

• "The best genius is that which absorbs and assimilates everything without doing the least violence to its fundamental destiny--that which we call character -- but rather improving it and enhancing it as far as possible."

• "A reasonable man needs only to practice moderation to find happiness."

• "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."

• "One has only to grow older to become more tolerant. I see no fault that I might not have committed myself."

• "Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though t'were his own."

• "One must be something in order to do something."

• "Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life."

• "Joy and sorrow both have part in my solitude."

• "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."

• "It's not that age brings childhood back again, 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. "

• "All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own."

• "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."

• "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."

• "What man knows, man sees."
  • Attributed to Goethe
  • "man" sometimes translated as "one"

Quotes from his Works

• Faust
• The Sorrows of Young Werther