Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Call no man happy until he is dead, but only lucky.

Let no man be called happy before his death. Till then, he is not happy, only lucky.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

Life for me has always been about timing, and it was bad timing for that disease to hit me; it was time to exit stage.

As Oscar tells to Chalky, eventually we all run out of road...

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.

Before a man dies, hold back and call him not happy but lucky.

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.

No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man's hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born.

In the end, the Wheel crushes us all.

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world. And Fate always wins.

Providence seems to look after the chumps of this world; and, personally, I'm all for it.

We all wind up the same way, no matter what our goals or ambitions are. We have nothing at all to say about how we got into this world or how are going to leave it.

In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

I don't believe in luck. We make our own good fortune.

Just death, kind umpire of men's miseries.

Letters crossing in the post, unfamiliar tunes heard three times in one day, the way that blows of fate descend upon the same bowed shoulders, and the beams of good fortune glow perpetually upon the blessed. Fairy tales, as I said, are lived out daily. There is far more going on in the world than we ever imagine.

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

And sing to those that hold the vital shears; And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound.

If I should come out of this war alive, I will have more luck than brains.

Luck never made a man wise.

It’s not the good that die young, it’s the lucky.

No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.