Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

"It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself."

"Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes."

"Personality is everything in art and poetry."

"I call architecture frozen music."

"In art the best is good enough."

"The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become."

"A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others."

"A useless life is an early death."

"All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green."

"All things are only transitory."

"Character develops itself in the stream of life."

"Correction does much, but encouragement does more."

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

"Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."

"Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be."

"He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion."

"If I love you, what business is it of yours?"

"Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago."

"In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it."

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."

"Love does not dominate; it cultivates."

"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."

"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable."

"Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction."

"No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others."

"On all the peaks lies peace."

"One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude."

"One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste."

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

"Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men."

"Superstition is the poetry of life."

"The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them."

"The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art."

"The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone."

"This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew."

"To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants."

"To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods."

"What is important in life is life, and not the result of life."

"What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own."

"Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?"

"Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him."