Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though ’twere his own.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHEBe above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!
More Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
Leap and the net will appear.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
What I possess, seems far away to me, and what is gone becomes reality.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it’s alive; then they have the parts and they’ve lost the whole, for the link that’s missing was the living soul.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
I love those who yearn for the impossible.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE -
The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE