Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Thought is the measure of life.

I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.

I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

There's more to light than the opposite of dark.

The word 'living' has so many connotations that I'm almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I'm then downgrading all the other significances of that word.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?

Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything

Time is the substance of which we are made

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

Things aren't different. Things are things.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

Reality is the page. Life is the word.

The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.

Nothing is ugly as long as it is alive.

I think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don't know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

Only where there is language is there world.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are

Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?

Time is the life of the soul.