Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it's happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience.

Happiness is like a cloud, if you stare at it long enough, it evaporates.

People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.

Happiness is brief. It will not stay. God batters at its sails.

When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.

How blessings brighten as they take their flight.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

the most deeply moving element in the contemplation of beauty is the element of loss. We desire to hold; but the sunset melts into the night, and the secret of the painting on the wall can never be the secret of the buyer.

Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.

The world was full of beauty. She wanted to grab hold of it and take it down into her bones. Yet always it seemed beyond her grasp. Sometimes only by a little, like now. The thinnest membrane. Usually, though, by miles. She couldn’t expect to be that kind of happy all the time. She knew that. But sometimes you could. Sometimes you should be allowed a tiny bit of joy that should stay with you for more than five minutes. That wasn’t too much to ask. To have a moment like this, and be able to hold on to it. To cross that membrane, and feel alive.

Beauty often fades, but seldom so swiftly as the joy it gives us.

Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-

...nothing wonderful lasted forever. Joy was as fleeting as a shooting star that crossed the evening sky, ready to blink out at any moment.

I'd found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.

The happiness of this world is something we cannot keep; it is just like the horizon - the nearer you go, the farther it goes. As soon as you get it, you see it is not the thing you wanted.

It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.

I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal.

You can have small moments of happiness in life. You certainly can't expect years and years of it.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.

So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.