The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine.
I laugh at my heart, and do its will.
You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.
Keep not standing fixed and rooted. Briskly venture, briskly roam.
Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it’s alive; then they have the parts and the’be lost the whole, for the link that’s missing was the living soul.
The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude. – Faust 1, lines 182-3.
The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.
If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost.
Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.
If you don’t feel it, you’ll never get it.
The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
And I have again observed, my dear friend, in this trifling affair, that misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence.
The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.
Do not hurry; do not rest.
We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.
Rest not Life is sweeping by go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.
Oh happy he who still can hope in our day to breathe the truth while plunged in seas of error! What we don’t know is really what we need, and what we know is of no use to us whatever!