Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Do stuff that is true to your own experiences.

Information can be passed from one to another, like a silver dollar. There's absolutely no wisdom except what you learn for yourself.

Words may help you understand something, but experience allows you to know. Never ever trade your own experience for someone else's words about anything that is really important... like God, for instance, or Love, or what is true about another.

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

To travel a circle is to journey over the same ground time and time again. To travel a circle wisely is to journey over the same ground for the first time. In this way, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the circle, a path to where you wish to be. And when you notice at last that the path has circled back into itself, you realize that where you wish to be is where you have already been ... and always were.

You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.

Always without desire we must be found, If its deep mystery we would sound; But if desire always within us be, Its outer fringe is all that we shall see.

Though we may be learned by another's knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own experience.

He that never thinks can never be wise.

I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.

Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.' Say not, ' I have found the path of the soul.' Say rather, 'I have met the soul walking upon my path.' For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

She went right down into her own personal experience for everything, reached down and pulled something out of herself that was unique and extraordinary. She had no techniques. It was all the truth, it was only Marilyn. But it was Marilyn, plus. She found things, found things about womankind in herself.

It is foolish to try to imitate the skills of others.

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else.

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.

When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way to ourselves.

Take a journey to the realm of the truth.