Quote

One should not wish anyone disagreeable conditions of life but for him who is involved in them by chance, they are touchstones of characters and of the most decisive value to man.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Age: 82 †
Born: 1749
Born: August 22
Died: 1832
Died: March 22
Aphorist
Art Critic
Art Theorist
Autobiographer
Botanist
Composer
Diarist
Diplomat
Jurist
Lawyer
Librarian
Librettist
Literary
Frankfurt/Main
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Goethe
goethe
johann wolfgang von goethe
joh. wolfg. von goethe
j. w. von goethe
Values
Disagreeable
Wish
Characters
Value
Character
Conditions
Men
Involved
Life
Anyone
Chance
Touchstones
Happiness
Decisive

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Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.
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The miller imagines that the corn grows only to make his mill turn.
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Ah! my poor brain is racked and crazed, My spirit and senses amazed!
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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.
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All our knowledge is symbolic.
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Like the star that shines afar, Without haste and without rest, Let each one wheel with steady sway Round the task that rules the day, And do their best.
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Unlimited activity, of whatever kind, must end in bankruptcy.
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If all these devils really exist it proves there must be angels, too.
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Piety, like nobility, has its aristocracy.
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In politics as on a sickbed men toss from side to side in hope of lying more comfortably.
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If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.
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two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.
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A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.
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The happiest man is the one who finds happiness at home.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Error is to truth as sleep is to waking. I have observed that one turns, as if refreshed, from error back to truth.
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Names are but noise and smoke, Obscuring heavenly light.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe