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Quotes from Maxims and Reflections — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749–1832 Germany

← All quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

42 quotes

The person engaged in action is always unconscionable; no one except the contemplative has a conscience.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

The world is a bell that is cracked: it clatters, but does not ring out clearly.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

He who does not speak foreign languages knows nothing about his own.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Association with women is the basic element of good manners.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

What is Classical is healthy; what is Romantic is sick.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before — you've just got to try to think it all over again.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Modern poets put a lot of water into their ink.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

You really only know when you know little. Doubt grows with knowledge.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

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)

Just as, out of habit, one consults a run-down clock as though it were still going, so too one may look at the face of a beautiful woman as though she were still in love.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Hypotheses are scaffoldings erected in front of a building and then dismantled when the building is finished. They are indispensable for the workman; but you mustn't mistake the scaffolding for the building.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

It is the most foolish of all errors for young people of good intelligence to imagine that they will forfeit their originality if they acknowledge truth already acknowledged by others.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

You've only got to grow old to be more lenient; I see no fault committed of which I too haven't been guilty.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

People say, “Artist, study nature!” But it is no small matter to develop what is noble out of what is common, beauty out of what lacks form.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

This is why we may say that those who parade piety as a purpose and an aim mostly turn into hypocrites

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

If some people hadn't felt obliged to repeat what is untrue simply because they had at one point maintained it, they would have turned into quite different people.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

You ask which form of government is the best? Whichever teaches us to govern ourselves.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

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)

Very often when we have found ourselves forever separated from what we had intended to achieve, we have already, on our way, found something else worth desiring.

Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.