Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Nation Quotations

Our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.

Profoundness, genius, spontaneity, merit, nobility, ingenuity, voice propriety, feeling, discernment, sensibility, good taste, great tone, rightness, courtliness, vivacity, boldness, style, freshness, harmony, perfection, imagination, purity, correctness. The greatest writer of all times. God's most astonishing creation.

I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world.

Few men have imagination enough for reality.

There is nothing more fearful than imagination without taste. [Ger., Es ist nichts furchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne Geschmack.]

Where the light is brightest, the shadows are deepest.

The important thing in life is to have a great aim, and the determination to attain it.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.

National literature no longer means very much, the age of world literature is due.

How many years you have to keep on doing, until you know what to do and how to do!

The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge.

I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.

If the mass of people hesitate to act, strike with swiftly and with boldness, the brave heart that understands and seizes opportunity can everything.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

As our inclinations, so our opinions.

The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinions of its young men under five-and-twenty

There is nothing more frightful than imagination without taste.