All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Nothing is great but truth, and the smallest truth is great. The other day I had a thought, which I put like this: Even a harmful truth is useful, for it can be harmful only for the moment and will lead to other truths, which must always become useful, very much so. Conversely, even a useful error is harmful, for it can be useful only for the moment, enticing us into other errors, which become more and more harmful.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nowhere would anyone grant that science and poetry can be united. They forgot that science arose from poetry, and failed to see that a change of times might beneficently reunite the two as friends, at a higher level and to mutual advantage.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit — this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We can’t form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There’s nothing clever that hasn’t been thought of before — you’ve just got to try to think it all over again.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I’m sorry for people who make a great to-do about the transitory nature of things and get lost in meditations of earthly nothingness. Surely we are here precisely so as to turn what passes into something that endures; but this is possible only if you can appreciate both.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nothing should be treasured more highly than the value of the day.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He alone is great and happy who fills his own station of independence, and has neither to command nor to obey.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe