Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Man

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was German writer, artist, and politician. Explore interesting quotes on man.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: 370 quotes49 likes

“Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Sets hims apart
From every other creature
On earth.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Das Göttliche

Das Göttliche (The Divine) (1783)

“Smoking stupefies a man, and makes him incapable of thinking or writing. It is only fit for idlers, people who are always bored, who sleep for a third of their lifetime, fritter away another third in eating, drinking, and other necessary or unnecessary affairs, and don’t know—though they are always complaining that life is so short—what to do with the rest of their time. Such lazy Turks find mental solace in handling a pipe and gazing at the clouds of smoke that they puff into the air; it helps them to kill time. Smoking induces drinking beer, for hot mouths need to be cooled down. Beer thickens the blood, and adds to the intoxication produced by the narcotic smoke. The nerves are dulled and the blood clotted. If they go on as they seem to be doing now, in two or three generations we shall see what these beer-swillers and smoke-puffers have made of Germany. You will notice the effect on our literature—mindless, formless, and hopeless; and those very people will wonder how it has come about. And think of the cost of it all! Fully 25,000,000 thalers a year end in smoke all over Germany, and the sum may rise to forty, fifty, or sixty millions. The hungry are still unfed, and the naked unclad. What can become of all the money? Smoking, too, is gross rudeness and unsociability. Smokers poison the air far and wide and choke every decent man, unless he takes to smoking in self-defence. Who can enter a smoker’s room without feeling ill? Who can stay there without perishing?”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Heinrich Luden, Rueckblicke in mein Leben, Jena 1847
Attributed

“Once a man's thirty, he's already old,
He is indeed as good as dead.
It's best to kill him right away.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Faust

Act II, The Gothic Chamber
Faust, Part 2 (1832)

“I hold to faith in the divine love — which, so many years ago for a brief moment in a little corner of the earth, walked about as a man bearing the name of Jesus Christ — as the foundation on which alone my happiness rests.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(1773), translated by Albert Schweizer in Goethe: Five Studies http://archive.is/tOo5z (1961), Beacon Press, p. 53

“Let the noble man
Be generous and good,
Tirelessly achieving
What is just and useful:
Let him be a model
For those beings whom he surmises.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Das Göttliche

Das Göttliche (The Divine) (1783)

“Is it so big a mystery
what god and man and world are?
No! but nobody knows how to solve it
so the mystery hangs on.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As translated by Jerome Rothenberg
Venetian Epigrams (1790)

“A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Maxim 1207, trans. Stopp
Variant translation: The greatest happiness for the thinking man is to have fathomed the fathomable, and to quietly revere the unfathomable.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

“Man errs as long as he strives.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Faust

Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.
Variant translation: Man will err while yet he strives.
Prologue in Heaven
Faust, Part 1 (1808)

“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!”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Elective Affinities

Dem Reichen übergibt der Baumeister mit dem Schlüssel des Palastes alle Bequemlichkeit und Behäbigkeit, ohne irgend etwas davon mitzugenießen. Muß sich nicht allgemach auf diese Weise die Kunst von dem Künstler entfernen, wenn das Werk wie ein ausgestattetes Kind nicht mehr auf den Vater zurückwirkt? Und wie sehr mußte die Kunst sich selbst befördern, als sie fast allein mit dem öffentlichen, mit dem, was allen und also auch dem Künstler gehörte, sich zu beschäftigen bestimmt war!
Bk. II, Ch. 3, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (1971), p. 170
Elective Affinities (1809)

“What wise or stupid thing can man conceive
That was not thought of in ages long ago?”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Faust

Act II, The Gothic Chamber
Faust, Part 2 (1832)

“A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Maxim 609, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

“For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

West-östlicher Diwan, Buch des Paradies (1819)

“The child’s desire to have distinctions made in his ideas grew stronger every day. Having learned that things had names, he wished to hear the name of every thing supposing that there could be nothing which his father did not know. He often teased him with his questions, and caused him to inquire concerning objects which, but for this, he would have passed without notice. Our innate tendency to pry into the origin and end of things was likewise soon developed in the boy. When he asked whence came the wind, and whither went the flame, his father for the first time truly felt the limitation of his own powers, and wished to understand how far man may venture with his thoughts, and what things he may hope ever to give account of to himself or others. The anger of the child, when he saw injustice done to any living thing, was extremely grateful to the father, as the symptom of a generous heart. Felix once struck fiercely at the cook for cutting up some pigeons. The fine impression this produced on Wilhelm was, indeed, erelong disturbed, when he found the boy unmercifully tearing sparrows in pieces and beating frogs to death. This trait reminded him of many men, who appear so scrupulously just when without passion, and witnessing the proceedings of other men. The pleasant feeling, that the boy was producing so fine and wholesome an influence on his being, was, in a short time, troubled for a moment, when our friend observed, that in truth the boy was educating him more than he the boy.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Book VIII – Chapter 1
Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre (Journeyman Years) (1821–1829)

“Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to the path which nature has marked out for him.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe