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Quotes from Elective Affinities — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749–1832 Germany

← All quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

12 quotes

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Elective Affinities (1809)

There is no outward mark of politeness that does not have a profound moral reason. The right education would be that which taught the outward mark and the moral reason together.

Elective Affinities (1809)

One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows.

Elective Affinities (1809)

The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.

Elective Affinities (1809)

No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.

Elective Affinities (1809)

Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.

Elective Affinities (1809)

Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed.

Elective Affinities (1809)

The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.

Elective Affinities (1809)

Whoever attacks marriage undermines […] the basis of all moral society.

Elective Affinities (1809)

Men who give way easily to tears are good. I have nothing to do with those who hearts are dry and who eyes are dry!

Elective Affinities (1809)

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

Elective Affinities (1809)

There are occasions ... when all consolation is base and it is a duty to despair.

Elective Affinities (1809)

Attribution

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