Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man.

God made man simple, but how he changed and got complicated is hard to say.

The little man is still a man.

A man does not mind being blamed for his faults, and being punished for them, and he patiently suffers much for them; but he becomes impatient if he is required to give them up.

One should not wish anyone disagreeable conditions of life; but for him who is involved in them by chance, they are touchstones of characters and of the most decisive value to man.

Forget not that the man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts in silence, and find his reward in the exercise of them, will generally find himself badly off.

Man's restlessness makes him strive.

Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.

Nobody, they say, is a hero to his valet. Of course; for a man must be a hero to understand a hero. The valet, I dare say, has great respect for some person of his own stamp.

Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to that path which nature has marked out for him.

There is nothing in the world more pitiable than an irresolute man, oscillating between two feelings, who would willingly unite the two and who does not perceive that nothing can unite them

Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous.

What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.

Man must strive, and striving he must err.

When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.

Sound and sufficient reason falls, after all, to the share of but few men, and those few men exert their influence in silence.

The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.

But the valid issue is the extent to which man knows how to form and master the material at his command.

Man errs, till he has ceased to strive.

It is only in misery that we recognize the hand of God leading good men to good.

All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless.

Every man must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.

Man, be he who he may, experiences a last piece of good fortune and a last day. [Ger., Der Mensch erfahrt, er sei auch wer er mag, Ein letztes Gluck und einen letzten Tag.]