Quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

Human life-everybody lives it, but only to a few is it known.

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

Nothing is worth more than this day. You cannot relive yesterday. Tomorrow is still beyond your reach.

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.

Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.

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

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.

The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinion of its young people, those under twenty-five.

It makes no good to point the failures out without showing at the same time the remedy to address them.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

To rule is easy, to govern difficult.

What by a straight path cannot be reached by crooked ways is never won.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.