Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

A day lays low and lifts up again all human things.

I think you can have varied and seemingly contradictory depictions of a single person because we all have many facets and, in a way, many selves.

I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world's greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecatio n, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

My point is, people really don't change very much.

In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die; the near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe.

By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contained between my hat and my boots.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

In the morn of life we are alert, we are heated in its noon, and only in its decline do we repose.

Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.

You’ve learned a new rule and it’s simple: don’t put yourself in situations you’d like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself, like that bunny in Runaway Bunny runs to its mother, but you are the mother and you’ll see that later and be very, very proud.

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total.

It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.

We began as mineral. We emerged into plant life, and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

Life and death and birth is this fantastic mystery that we cannot fully grasp.

We must not always try to plumb the depths of the human heart; the truths it contains are among those that are best seen in half-light or in perspective.

Learning, like love, death and eating, are fundamental human activities. It's at the core of human existence and its character has a resilience of continuity that is part of what makes up human nature. That is not fundamentally going to change.

In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

Nature grinds all of us. Keep count of the ounce of pleasure you get. In the long run, nature did her work through you, and when you die your body will make other plants grow. Yet we think all the time that we are getting pleasure ourselves. Thus the wheel goes round.

Such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labor and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other; such are the changes that keep the mind in action: we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else and begin a new pursuit.

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

It is a strange thing ,that every child is born with a closed hand , and every body dies with an open hand !