Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic

And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.

I shall show the cinders of my spirits Through the ashes of my chance.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

Art is science in the flesh.

Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.

The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.

We live ruins amid ruins.

To live beneath sorrow, one must yield to it.

Presume not that I am the thing I was.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.

History teaches everything, even the future.

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

It is not reason that gives us our moral orientation, it is sensitivity.

I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die.