Goethe Quotes

39 Goethe quotes by 35 unique authors

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny. — Guy Davenport
Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only… — Edwin Muir
The sun had, in the meanwhile, sunk behind the Ettersberg. We felt in the wood the chill of the evening, and drove all the quicker… — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? ... or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal… — Gerard De Nerval
I never dreamed of being Shakespeare or Goethe, and I never expected to hold the great mirror of truth up before the world; I dreamed… — Peter Altenberg
India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as… — Lin Yutang
The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of… — Benedetto Croce
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
My understanding – of course, I’m not a philosopher or a scientist – of an aspect of Goethe’s theory of color is that he felt… — Alex Webb
When they learn of Shakespeare and Goethe, we must teach them of Pushkin and Dumas. . . . Whatever the white man has done, we… — Mary McLeod Bethune
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — John Herschel
It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry… — John Ruskin
To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of… — John Cowper Powys
All is fish that comes to the literary net. Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems, I turn my adventures into bread and butter. — Louisa May Alcott
Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology… — Stephen Jay Gould
We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer… — Ralph Waldo Emerson
You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer… — Austin Kleon
I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the… — John F. Kennedy
Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art… — Robert Kennedy
I observed once to Goethe that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away.… — Arthur Schopenhauer
Goethe said there would be little left of him if he were to discard what he owed to others. — Charlotte Saunders Cushman
I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the… — Gerhard Richter
I like being old, even if the names I hear are more and more unfamiliar. Maybe, to paraphrase Goethe who said that, "Youth is wasted… — Wolf Kahn
Not like Homer would I write, Not like Dante if I might, Not like Shakespeare at his best, Not like Goethe or the rest, Like… — William Allingham
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. — H. L. Mencken

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