319 quotes
Age does not make us childish, as they say.<br
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
Zwey Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust.
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
And here, poor fool! with all my lore<br
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
I am the Spirit that always denies!
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
Man errs as long as he strives.
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
I hold to faith in the divine love — which, so many years ago for a brief moment in a little corner of the earth, walked about as a man bearing the name of Jesus Christ — as the foundation on which alone my happiness rests.
There are occasions ... when all consolation is base and it is a duty to despair.
Elective Affinities (1809)
The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit — this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786)
Blood is a juice of rarest quality.
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.
I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way.
Beware of her fair hair, for she excels
All women in the magic of her locks,
And when she twines them round a young man’s neck
She will not ever set him free again.
I have by no means an aversion to things Indian, but I am afraid of them, for they draw my imagination into the formless and the diffuse against which I have to guard myself more than ever before.
The message well I hear, my faith alone is weak
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
A true German can't stand the French,<br
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
On every mountain height
Is rest.
Not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups — that is the wisdom of teachers. Whoever merely tastes of his error, will keep house with it for a long time, ... but whoever drains it completely will have to get to know it.
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786)
Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom,
Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket's gloom,
Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows,
And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786)
By way of a personal compromise, he became an adept of the "noble and pure" wisdom of the Parsees as a means of escaping from the "narrow circle of Hebraic-Rabbinic thought and of reaching the depth and amplitude of Sanskrit".