Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Error is related to truth as sleeping is to waking. I have observed that when one has been in error, one turns to truth as though revitalized.

The world is a bell that is cracked: it clatters, but does not ring out clearly.

It is the most foolish of all errors for young people of good intelligence to imagine that they will forfeit their originality if they acknowledge truth already acknowledged by others.

Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.

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.

The architect hands over to the rich man with the keys to his palace all the ease and comfort to be found in it without being able to enjoy any of it himself. Must the artist not in this way gradually become alienated from his art, since his work, like a child that has been provided for and left home, can no longer have any effect upon its father? And how beneficial it must have been for art when it was intended to be concerned almost exclusively with what was public property, and belonged to everybody and therefore also to the artist!

There are occasions ... when all consolation is base and it is a duty to despair.

There is no outward mark of politeness that does not have a profound moral reason. The right education would be that which taught the outward mark and the moral reason together.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Art is in itself noble; that is why the artist has no fear of what is common. This, indeed, is already ennobled when he takes it up.

People have to become really bad before they care for nothing but mischief, and delight in it.

Men who give way easily to tears are good. I have nothing to do with those who hearts are dry and who eyes are dry!