“The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.”

from Theory of Colors

Chapters: 1. The Unnamed

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from Faust, part II

Chapters: 1. The Unnamed

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“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

Chapters: 38. Fruit Over Flowers

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“Every creature is only a tone, a modification in a mighty harmony.”

Chapters: 13. Honor and Disgrace

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“Every second is of infinite value.”

Chapters: 35. The Power of Goodness

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“Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.”

Chapters: 32. Uncontrived Awareness

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“Fortunate is he whose world lies in his home.”

from Faust, part II

Chapters: 47. Effortless Success

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“He who moves not forward, goes backward.”

Chapters: 24. Unnecessary Baggage

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“If there is confusion in your head and in your heart, what more do you want! A man who no longer loves and no longer errs should have himself buried straight away.”

Chapters: 43. No Effort, No Trace

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“If you treat someone as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”

Chapters: 17. True Leaders

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“It is ever true that he who does nothing for others, does nothing for himself.”

Chapters: 81. Journey Without Goal

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“Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound.”

Chapters: 63. Easy as Hard

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“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.”

Chapters: 33. Know Yourself

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“Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”

Chapters: 75. Greed

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“One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.”

Chapters: 57. Wu Wei

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“Rest not - life is sweeping by
Go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime,
leave behind to conquer time.”

Chapters: 70. Inscrutable

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“Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it right away.”

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

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“The deed is everything; the fame is nothing.”

Chapters: 44. Fame and Fortune

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“The way you see people is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is what they become.”

Chapters: 49. No Set Mind

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“There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings.”

Chapters: 20. Unconventional Mind

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“There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.”

Chapters: 40. Returning

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“They should be ashamed of themselves, all these sober people!”

Chapters: 22. Heaven's Door

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“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”

Chapters: 44. Fame and Fortune

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“Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude… happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.”

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

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“We know accurately only when we know little; doubt grows with knowledge... With wisdom grows doubt.”

Chapters: 67. Three Treasures

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“What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.”

Chapters: 18. The Sick Society

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“No revolution is the fault of the people but always the fault of the government.”

from Faust, part I

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“It is unthinkable that wisdom should ever be popular.”

from Faust, part I

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

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“Timeless wisdom draws us on”

from Faust, part II

Chapters: 8. Like Water

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“All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.”

from Faust, part I

Chapters: 12. This Over That

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“The world has always been the same — an endless farce, an antic game, a universal masquerade!”

from Faust, part II

Chapters: 5. Christmas Trees

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“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”

Chapters: 27. No Trace

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“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

Chapters: 18. The Sick Society

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“Must it ever be thus-that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery?”

Chapters: 46. Enough

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“What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.”

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“So, lively brisk old fellow, don't let age get you down. White hair or not, you can still be a lover.”

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“Have all the nations of the world since his time produced one dramatist worthy to hand Euripides his slippers?”

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“Mystically pure, in his poetry Hafiz has inscribed undeniable truth indelibly… This is a madness I know—Hafiz has no peer.”

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“Science and art belong to the whole world and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.”

from Maxims

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“Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.”

from Maxims

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“Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity”

from Maxims

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“The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”

from Maxims

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

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“To a new truth, there is nothing more hurtful than an old error.”

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“It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth; error is superficial and may be corrected; truth lies hidden in the depths.”

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“There is nothing more odious than the majority. It consists of a few powerful men who lead the way; of accommodating rascals and submissive weaklings; and of a mass of men who trot after them without in the least knowing their own minds.”

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“Let us not dream that reason can ever be popular. Passions and emotions may be made popular, but reason remains ever the property of the few.”

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“The Eternal Feminine ever draws us upward.”

from Faust, part II

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“National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.”

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“If a man thinks about his physical or moral state, he usually discover that he is ill.”

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“Try novelties for salesman's bait, novelty wins everyone.”

from Faust, part I

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“He who has Science and has Art, Religion too has he;
Who has not Science, has not Art, Let him religious be!”

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“May I not be like those who spend their days complaining about headaches and their nights drinking the wine which gives them their headaches!”

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“Spirit and matter, soul and body, thought and extension are necessary twin ingredients of the universe, and will be forever with equal rights. Those who do not grasp this and rise to the vision might as well waste away their days with the world's idle gossip.”

from Letter to Knebel, 1812

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“Everything transient is but a symbol.”

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“By eternal, ironclad
Great laws,
Must we all,
Of our existence,
Fulfill the round.”

from Das Göttliche, 1783 (The Divine)

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“Contemplating a library, one feels as though in the presence of vast capital silently yielding incalculable interest.”

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“But man alone can do the impossible;
He distinguishes, chooses, and judges;
He can to the fleeting moment
Give duration”

from Das Göttliche, 1783

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“It is our duty to tell others no more than they are able to receive. Man grasps only what is to his measure.”

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“In politics, as on a sickbed, men toss from side to side in the hope of lying more comfortably.”

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“No blessing is equal to the blessings of work. To know and practice a craft lends greater culture than half-knowledge, a hundred times over.”

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“It still saddens me that Lord Byron, who showed such impatience with the fickle public, wasn't aware of how well the Germans can understand him and how highly they esteem him. With us the moral and political tittle-tattle of the day falls away, leaving the man and the talent standing alone in all their brilliance.
”

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“From desire I plunge to its fulfillment, where I long once more for desire.”

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“Now let me dare to open wide the gate/Past which men's steps have ever flinching trod.”

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“No wise combatant underestimates their antagonist.”

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“Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freer handling.”

from Elective Affinities (1809)

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“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

from Faust, part I

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“It's useless to complain about your enemies; if your whole being is a standing reproach to them, they can never become your friends.”

from Westoóstlicher Divan

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“Energy is the basis of everything. Every Jew, no matter how insignificant, is engaged in some decisive and immediate pursuit of a goal… It is the most perpetual people of the earth…”

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“The happy do not believe in miracles.”

from Herman and Dorothea

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“He only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew.”

from Faust, part II

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“He who is plenteously provided for from within, needs but little from without.”

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“Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind and is as various as nature herself.”

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“One should—every day at least—hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.”

from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796)

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“He who moves not forward, goes backward.”

from Herman and Dorothea (1797)

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“One never realizes fully that a language is originally only symbolical, using only pictures, and that it never expresses the objects directly but only reflects.”

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“There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.”

from Elective Affinities (1809)

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“Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character best formed in the stormy billows of the world.”

from Torquato Tasso (1790)

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“An unused life is an early death.”

from Iphigenie and Tauris (1787)

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“From the forces that all creatures bind, who overcomes himself his freedom finds.”

from Die Geheimnisse (1776)

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“Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.”

from Faust, part I

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“The few, who have known somewhat of these things, who foolishly did not keep a guard over their full hearts, who revealed their feelings and thoughts to the people, these, from time immemorial, have been crucified and burned.”

from Faust, part I

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“Art is long, life is short; judgment difficult, opportunity fleeting.”

from Herman and Dorothea (1797)

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“The fool and the wise man are equally harmless; it is the half-wise and the half-foolish who are most to be feared.”

from Sprüche in Prosa

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“Our lives, like the universe to which we belong, are mysteriously composed of freedom and necessity… We belong to the laws of nature, even when we rebel against them.”

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“The highest problem of every art is, by means of appearances, to produce the illusion of a loftier reality.”

from Truth and Poetry

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“Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonplace that their spirit and the senses easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect.”

from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

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“The rainbow mirrors human aims and action. Life is but light in many-hued reflection.”

from Faust, part II

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“The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use, finds his greatest happiness in using it.”

from Meister Wilhelm's Apprenticeship

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“The right man is the one that seizes the moment.”

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“Art is long, life is short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.”

from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenrticeship (1796)

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“that lavishly generous confidence in the worthiness of average human nature to be told all truth, the lack of which in Goethe made him an inspiration to the few but a cold riddle to the many.”

— William James 1842 – 1910 CE
"Father of American psychology”
from Collected Essays, 1920

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“Old age did not put an end to Goethe’s career as a lover: in 1821, when he was seventy-two, the widowed Goethe fell in love with a seventeen-year-old girl he met at a spa resort, and even proposed marriage. (She sensibly declined.)... At the age of eighty-two, dying of a painful heart condition, Goethe’s last words were 'More light!'... it is Goethe’s last perfect metaphor: one final plea for illumination, from a writer who had spent all his life seeking it.”

— Adam Kirsch 1976 CE –
from The New Yorker

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“Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother.”

— Camille Paglia 1947 CE –
Fearless and insightful status quo critic
from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“the same Goethe who held that, in the end, personality is everything, warned us that limits are everywhere.”

— Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Fallen Leaves

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“As in science, so in philosophy he was a lover, not a professor... he was endlessly concerned with the interpretation of nature and the meaning of life. As he became older, he grew through science and poetry into a sage. He found illumination about the whole from every object, moment, and part”

— Will (and Ariel) Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
from Rousseau and Revolution

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“Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet... At last I had found confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power and—more important—the role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering... My godfather and authority was the great Goethe himself... But I could not forgive him... I was deeply sorry that Goethe too had fallen for those cunning devices by which evil is rendered innocuous.”

— Carl Jung 1875 – 1961 CE
Insightful shamanistic scientist
from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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“It is quite a piece of folly to sacrifice the inner for the outer man, to give the whole or the greater part of one's quiet, leisure, and independence for splendor, rank, pomp, title and honor This is what Goethe did. My good luck drew me quite in the other direction.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860 CE
from Personality, or What a Man Is

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“To Musset, it was only after Napoleon that Byron and Goethe were the greatest geniuses of the century... To Carlyle, Goethe and Byron were antitheses; to Alfred de Musset, they were accomplices in the wicked work of instilling the poisoning of melancholy into the cheerful Gallic soul.”

— Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 CE
“20th century Voltaire”
from History of Western Philosophy

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“Especially in his twenties—before he was consumed by opium—Coleridge's greatest addiction was the natural world of mountains and valleys, woods and seas... Writer's such as Coleridge and Goethe not only created poetry our of the awe-inspiring sublime in nature; both of them also had a strong scientific bent.”

— Roman Krznaric 1
Practical, popular, modern philosopher

from Carpe Diem Regained (2017)

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