Top 500 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Nothing is more odious than the majority, for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and submissive weaklings, and a mass of men who trot after them without thinking, or knowing their own minds.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

252. “A noble soul alone can noble souls attract; And knows alone, as ye, to hold them.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

253. “Investigate what is, and not what pleases.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

254. “If nature is your teacher, your soul will awaken.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

255. “Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

256. “Properly speaking, such work is never finished; one must declare it so when, according to time and circumstances, one has done one’s best.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

257. “Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

258. “Of all thieves, fools are the worst; they rob you of time and temper.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

259. “All things are only transitory.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

260. “Don’t dissipate your powers; strive to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it will surely repent of every ill-judged outlay.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

261. “Talents are nurtured best in solitude, But character on life’s tempestuous seas!”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

262. “The history of science is science itself; the history of the individual, the individual.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

263. “Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

264. “What I possess, seems far away to me, and what is gone becomes reality.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

265. “By nature we have no defect that could not become a strength, no strength that could not become a defect.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

266. “Let’s plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will – it’s only action that can make a man.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

267. “Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

268. “Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

269. “And we went our separate ways without having understood each other. As in this world nobody understands the other easily.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

270. “Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

271. “We will burn that bridge when we come to it.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

272. “Deny yourself! You must deny yourself! That is the song that never ends.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

273. “Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

274. “The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

275. “What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

276. “What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

277. “To create something you must be something.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

278. “Character develops itself in the stream of life.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

279. “All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

280. “I am fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and its activity will continue through eternity.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

281. “For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

282. “The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and beginning of his life.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

283. “The human mind will not be confined to any limits.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

284. “Aptitudes are assumed, they should become accomplishments. That is the purpose of all education.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

285. “Always to distrust is an error, as well as always to trust.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

286. “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.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

287. “A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

288. “Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

289. “If you inquire what people are like here, I must answer, “The same as everywhere.””

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

290. “Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

291. “If you’ve never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

292. “A man’s shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

293. “What you have inherited from your forefathers, it takes work to make it your own.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

294. “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.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

295. “True love is love that stays constant for ever, whatever it’s fortune; whether requited or scored, filled or sent empty away.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

296. “To measure up to all that is demanded of him, a man must overestimate his capacities.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

297. “Keep not standing fixed and rooted. Briskly venture, briskly roam.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

298. “Out of moderation a pure happiness springs.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

299. “The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

300. “Man must strive, and striving he must err.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe