Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Nature tells every secret once.

People die when curiosity goes.

How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah.

If I revealed all that has been made known to me, scarcely a man on this stand would stay with me.' and 'Brethren, if I were to tell you all I know of the kingdom of God, I do know that you would rise up and kill me.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.

The perfect knowledge of events cannot be acquired without divine inspiration, since all prophetic inspiration receives its prime motivating force from God the creator, then from good fortune and nature.

Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals us to ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles.

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.

The Gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us, but in the course of time through seeking we may learn & know things better. But as for certain truth no man knows it, nor shall he know it, neither of the Gods nor yet of all things that I speak. For even if by chance he were to utter The Final Truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses.

Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest--beginning, middle, and end--isnothing but dreams and smoke.

The volume of Nature is the book of knowledge.

Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.

Nature does not reveal all her secrets at once. We imagine we are initiated in her mysteries: we are, as yet, but hanging around her outer courts.

Just supposing for the sake of the argument that there is a being of such a kind as that He may with any propriety be called "God", it does seem antecedently very improbable that weak and limited creatures of a day, such as we are, should discover Him by our own efforts.... who could be discovered in that way would hardly be worth discovering. I think we ought to stick to that principle rather firmly. I think we ought to be rather sure that we cannot know God unless God has been pleased to reveal Himself to us.

For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!

Nature yields her most profound secrets to the person who is determined to uncover them.

Disguise is central to God's way of dealing with us human beings. Not because God is playing games with us but because the God who is beyond our knowing makes himself known in the disguise of what we can know. The Christian word for this is revelation, and the ultimate revelation came by incarnation. ... God is the master of disguises, in order that we might see.

Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.

Some things it don't pay to be curious about.

It is vain to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself.

The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity.

Wherefore also these Kinds [elements] occupied different places even before the universe was organised and generated out of them. Before that time, in truth, all these were in a state devoid of reason or measure, but when the work of setting in order this Universe was being undertaken, fire and water and earth and air, although possessing some traces of their known nature, were yet disposed as everything is likely to be in the absence of God; and inasmuch as this was then their natural condition, God began by first marking them out into shapes by means of forms and numbers.

Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.

Watch out for people who think it's embarrassing not to know.