Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes about Life

Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake

Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love, Life, Happiness

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Important, Contentment

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Motivational, Softball

Daily life is more instructive than the most effective book.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Book, Daily Life

"Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann".

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Thanksgiving, Blessed

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Inspirational, Life, Trust

Rest not. Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Inspirational, Life, Time

If you want to make life easy, make it hard.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Motivational, Positive

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Godly, Childhood

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love, Life, Marriage

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love, Inspirational, Life

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Hope, Anticipation

It is not enough to take steps which may someday lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Success, Running

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann, Frédéric Jacob Soret (1850). “Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret”, p.65

Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Harsh, Teach

"Iphigenia in Tauris". Play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Act 4, Scene 4, 1786.

We cannot too soon convince ourselves how easily we may be dispensed with in the world. What important personages we imagine ourselves to be! We think that we alone are the life of the circle in which we move; in our absence, we fancy that life, existence, breath will come to a general pause, and, alas, the gap which we leave is scarcely perceptible, so quickly is it filled again; nay, it is often the place, if not of something better, at least for something more agreeable.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Moving, Thinking

If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Reality, Inspire

Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love, Life, Girl

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Oxenford (2013). “The Auto-Biography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life”, p.6, Cambridge University Press

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Witty, Clever

Live dangerously and you live right.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Success, Insightful

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Carlyle Ferren MacIntyre (1957). “Goethe's Faust, Part 1: New American Version”, p.125, New Directions Publishing

That is the way of youth and life in general: that we do not understand the strategy until after the campaign is over.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Campaigns, Way

Quite often, as life goes on, when we feel completely secure as we go on our way, we suddenly notice that we are trapped in error, that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by individuals, by objects, have dreamt up an affinity with them which immediately vanishes before our waking eye; and yet we cannot tear ourselves away, held fast by some power that seems incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, however, we become fully aware and realize that error as well as truth can move and spur us on to action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Moving, Taken

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Softball, Wisdom

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Walter Arnold Kaufmann (1961). “Faust: part one and sections from part two”

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.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Moving, Thinking

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1963). “Goethe's world view: presented in his reflections and maxims”

True observers of nature, although they may think differently, will still agree that everything that is, everything that is observable as a phenomenon, can only exhibit itself in one of two ways. It is either a primal polarity that is able to unify, or it is a primal unity that is able to divide. The operation of nature consists of splitting the united or uniting the divided; this is the eternal movement of systole and diastole of the heartbeat, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, act, and exist.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Heart, Thinking