319 quotes
Even if the world progresses generally, youth will always begin at the beginning, and the epochs of the world's cultivation will be repeated in the individual.
Mathematicians are [like] a sort of Frenchmen; if you talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and then it is immediately something quite different.
Where knowledge suffices, we have no need of belief; but where knowledge does not prove its virtue or appears insufficient, we should not dispute the rights of belief.
The sagacious reader who is capable of reading between these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception.
Nothing venture, nothing gain.
Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,
Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours
Weeping upon his bed has sate,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786)
Who science has and art
He has religion too
Who neither of them owns
Religion is his due.
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786)
Your messages I hear, but faith has not been given;
The dearest child of Faith is Miracle.
He who moves not forward goes backward!
A capital saying!
Presents at once? That's good. He is sure to succeed.
Modern poets put a lot of water into their ink.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.
Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
Torquato Tasso (1790)
Youth is intoxication without wine.
If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.
Is it so big a mystery
what god and man and world are?
No! but nobody knows how to solve it
so the mystery hangs on.
Venetian Epigrams (1790)
Rash combat oft immortalizes man.
If he should fall, he is renowned in song.
Water its living strength first shows,
When obstacles its course oppose.
You really only know when you know little. Doubt grows with knowledge.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
The folly! Every man in turn would still
His own peculiar notions magnify!
If Islam mean submission to God’s will,
May we all live in Islam, and all die.
West–östlicher Divan (West–Eastern Diwan) (1819)
It is as certain as it is marvelous that truth and error come from one source. Therefore one often may not injure error, because at the same time one injures truth.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
Law is mighty, mightier necessity.
Faust, Part 2 (1832)