Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To accept good advice is but to increase one's own ability.

Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we'll need no other light.

It is so hard that one cannot really have confidence in doctors and yet cannot do without them.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Courage and modesty are the most unequivocal of virtues, for they are of a kind that hypocrisy cannot imitate; they too have this quality in common, that they are expressed by the same color.

As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.

If society gives up the right to impose the death penalty, then self-help will appear again and personal vendettas will be around the corner.

Our friends show us what we can do; our enemies teach us what we must do.

He who does not feel his friends to be the world to him, does not deserve that the world should hear of him.

Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

It is better to be deceived by one's friends than to deceive them.

To tremble before anticipated evils is to bemoan what thou hast never lost.

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.

Desire is the presentiment of our inner abilities, and the forerunner of our ultimate accomplishments.

Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong.

Thus I reel from desire to fulfillment and in fulfillment languish for desire.

Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

How circumscribed is woman's destiny!

The best genius is that which absorbs and assimilates everything without doing the least violence to its fundamental destiny.

By seeking and blundering we learn.

I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.