Top 500 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Our virtues and view spring from one root.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

452. “The close and thoughtful observer more and more learns to recognize his limitations. He realizes that with the steady growth of knowledge more and more new problems keep on emerging.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

453. “Since Time is not a person we can overtake when he is gone, let us honor him with mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

454. “Anyone that doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

455. “A vain man can never be utterly ruthless: he wants to win applause and therefore he accommodates himself to others.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

456. “A distracted existence leads us to no goal.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

457. “I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

458. “Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

459. “Paternity is based anyhow only upon conviction: I am convinced, therefore, I am the father.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

460. “Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

461. “To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

462. “To understand one thing well is better than understanding many things by halves.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

463. “Moral epochs have their course as well as the seasons. We can no more hold them fast than we can hold sun, moon, and stars. Our faults perpetually return upon us; and herein lies the subtlest difficulty of self-knowledge.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

464. “God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

465. “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.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

466. “A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

467. “A man is really alive only when he delights in the good-will of others.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

468. “People can only live with their equals, and not even with them; for in the long run they cannot tolerate that someone is their equal.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

469. “Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

470. “In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

471. “Tolerance should, strictly speaking, be only a passing mood; it ought to lead to acknowledgment and appreciation. To tolerate a person is to affront him.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

472. “There is no truer, warmer pleasure in this world than to behold a great soul opening up towards oneself.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

473. “How circumscribed is woman’s destiny!”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

474. “Words express neither objects nor ourselves.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

475. “One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

476. “We cannot and must not get rid of nor deny our characteristics. But we can give them shape and direction.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

477. “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.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

478. “The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

479. “Know’st thou the land where the lemon-trees bloom, Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket’s gloom, Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows, And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose!”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

480. “The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

481. “For the nature of women is closely allied to art.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

482. “Stones are mute teachers; they silence the observer, and the most valuable lesson we learn from them we cannot communicate.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

483. “We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

484. “No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

485. “Were not the eye made to receive the rays of the sun, it could not behold the sun; if the peculiar power of God lay not in us, how could the godlike charm us?”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

486. “The beginning of faith is the beginning of fruitfulness; but the beginning of unbelief, however glittering, is empty.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

487. “The deed is everything, the glory is naught.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

488. “I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

489. “Let no one be like another, yet everyone like the highest. How is this done? Be each one perfect in himself.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

490. “A life without love, without the presence of the beloved, is nothing but a mere magic-lantern show. We draw out slide after slide, swiftly tiring of each, and pushing it back to make haste for the next.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

491. “There is nothing outside of us that is not at the same time in us, and as the external world has its colors the eye, too, has colors.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

492. “Wine rejoices the heart of man and joy is the mother of all virtues.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

493. “A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

494. “Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

495. “Impotent hatred is the most horrible of all emotions; one should hate nobody whom one cannot destroy.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

496. “Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of nature with which she indicates how much she loves us.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

497. “It is sometimes essential for a husband and a wife to quarrel – they get to know each other better.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

498. “When she sees the leaves fall, they raise no other idea in her mind than that winter is approaching.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

499. “Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

500. “He who is plenteously provided for from within needs but little from without.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe