Quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.


Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity.


How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to.


If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.


Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.


Nothing is worse than active ignorance.


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.


So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else.


The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.


There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.