GOETHE

Fragments:

· Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

· From inaccessible mountain range, by way of desert untrod by human foot, to the ends of the unknown seas, the breath of the everlasting creative spirit is felt, rejoicing over every speck of dust that hearkens to it and lives.

· It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.

· Since I have heard often enough that everyone in the end has his own religion, nothing seemed more natural to me than to fashion my own.

· There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on how one looks at it.

· Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

· By nature we have no defect that could not become a strength, no strength that could not become a defect.

· The passing day is prey to error. Time commands success and achievement.

· Nothing is worse than active ignorance.

· Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced.

· Once one knows what really matters, one ceases to be voluble. And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing, doing and thinking---and these are the sum of all wisdom...Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and breathing out. Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought, thought by action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his way back to the right road.

· Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned.

· We cannot possess what we do not understand.

· Hypotheses are lullabies for teachers to sing their students to sleep. The close and thoughtful observer more and more learns to recognize his limitations. He realizes that with the steady growth of knowledge more and more new problems keep on emerging.

· The further one advances in experience, the closer one comes to the unfathomable; the more one learns to utilize experience, the more one recognizes that the unfathomable is of no practical value.

· The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.

· Once you have missed the first buttonhole you'll never manage to button up.

· The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomena.

· We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.

· To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.

· We are never deceived: we deceive ourselves.

· Our senses don't deceive us: our judgment does.

· Mastery is often taken for egotism.

· Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

· Everything great and intelligent is in the minority.

· Altogether national hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

· When you praise someone you call yourself his equal.

· The solution of every problem is another problem.

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

· After fifteen minutes nobody looks at a rainbow.

· To have a positive religion is not necessary. To be in harmony with yourself and the universe is what counts, and this is possible without positive and specific formulation in words.

· The phrases men are accustomed to repeat incessantly, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.

· Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.

· If you start to think about your physical or moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

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

· Nothing hurts a new truth more than an old error.

· Everyone hears only what he understands.

· You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere.

· We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies.

· He who moves not forward, goes backward.

· He alone is great and happy who requires neither to command nor to obey in order to secure his being of some importance in the world.

· Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there...

· Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love.

· I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial.

· The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

· Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

· Nature has neither kernel nor shell; she is everything at once.

· A vain man can never be utterly ruthless: he wants to win applause and therefore he accommodates himself to others.

· If you would create something, you must be something.

· Nothing is more revolting than the majority; for it consists of few vigorous predecessors, of knaves who accommodate themselves, of weak people who assimilate themselves, and the mass that toddles after them without knowing in the least what it wants.

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