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There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.

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
Action
Ideas
Time
Enlivens
Confines
Enlarge
Capable

More quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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When two men quarrel, who owns the cooler head is the more to blame.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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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.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Normally, the sciences distance themselves from life and the return to it via a detour.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The misfortune in the state is, that nobody can enjoy life in peace, but that everybody must govern and in art, that nobody will enjoy what has been produced, but that every one wants to reproduce on his own account.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Fret not over the irretrievable, but ever act as if thy life were just begun.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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To know where a thing is we must have found it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot that it is securely founded that it be successfully executed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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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.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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At the end of life thoughts hitherto impossible come to the collected mind, like good spirits which let themselves down from the shining heights of the past.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Some of our weaknesses are born in us, others are the result of education it is a question which of the two gives us most trouble.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the darksome hours Weeping, and watching for the morrow,- He knows you not, ye heavenly Powers.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Modern poets mix too much water with their ink. [Ger., Neuere Poeten thun viel Wasser in die Tinte.]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Courage and modesty are the most unequivocal of virtues, for they are of a kind that hypocrisy cannot imitate they too have this quality in common, that they are expressed by the same color.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Time itself is an element.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The eternal feminine doth draw us upward. [Ger., Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Why go further and further, Look, happiness is right here. Learn how to grab hold of luck, For luck is always there.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe