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If you don't know foreign languages, you don't know anything about your own.

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
Language
Anything
Languages
Foreign

More quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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We who didn't inherit political power nor are made to acquire riches like nothing better than that which expands and solidifies the power of the spirit.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If you are convinced of a matter, you must take sides or you don't deserve to succeed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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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
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Beautiful is greater than Good, for it includes the Good.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries--to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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To blow is not to play on the flute you must move the fingers. [Ger., Blasen ist nicht floten, ihr musst die Finger bewegen.]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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To the man of thought almost nothing is really ridiculous.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Nothing is good for a nation but that which arises from its own core and its own general wants, without apish imitation of another.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The mob has nothing to lose, everything to gain.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The heights charm us, but the steps do not with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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What is fruitful alone is true.
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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Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Whatever we think out, whatever we take in hand to do, should be perfectly and finally finished, that the world, if it must alter, will only have to spoil it we have then nothing to do but unite the severed, to recollect and restore the dismembered.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and, despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine.
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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Everyone is deceived in his hopes, cheated in his expectations.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Let us not dream that reason can ever be popular. Passions, emotions, may be made popular but reason remains ever the property of an elect few.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe