39 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes on Psychology

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes on psychology

3. If you inquire what the people are like here, I must answer, 'The same as everywhere!'

9. A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.

11. We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.

12. The spirits that I summoned up I now can't rid myself of.

30. Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, And in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own. Not in the morning alone, not only at mid-day he charmeth; Even at setting, the sun is still the same glorious planet.

36. What's it to you if I love you?

59. Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.

60. No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.

62. Age does not make us childish, as they say. It only finds us true children still.

64. Da stehe ich nun, ich armer Thor! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor.

65. Am I a god? I see so clearly!

66. Two souls alas! dwell in my breast.

67. Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.

69. Die Botschaft hor ich wohl, allein, mir fehlt der Glaube

74. Schon war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.

91. A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

95. Everything that emancipates the spirit without giving us control over ourselves is harmful.

97. A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.

99. Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

102. Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

104. Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong.

106. Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

108. Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

115. If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.

119. It's not that age brings childhood back again, age merely shows what children we remain.

121. Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.

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

128. One has only to grow older to become more tolerant. I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.

129. Only when we know little do we know anything; doubt grows with knowledge.

131. Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

132. Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.

135. The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

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

140. The phrases that men hear or repeat continually, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.

144. To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.

146. We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

149. What one knows, one sees.

152. Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

153. You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.