Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Sometimes ideas feel like they were already there, and that you're just discovering them.

I'm more interested in what I discover than what I invent.

The most valuable thing in culture is to find something first - so everyone is always looking.

I, therefore, O Caesar, do not publish this work, merely prefixing my name to a treatise which of right belongs to others, nor think of acquiring reputation by finding fault with the works of any one.

You basically only discover a new thing once.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Eureka [I have found it]

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it..

Every now and then, someone comes along - we used to call it 'New Jack' - tries to do something new, tries to take all the credit, without acknowledging the past.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery!

I will be sufficiently rewarded if when telling it to others you will not claim the discovery as your own, but will say it was mine.

Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing-and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite - that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research.

Whatever is well said by another, is mine.

If you start with the mindset that you know nothing, you will learn a lot that nobody knew before.

One must look for one thing only, to find many.

It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.

People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.

For the scientists, they're kind of puzzled and pleased that somebody finds their work interesting. It makes it fun for me. I feel like I've sort of turned over a stone that hasn't been turned over.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original.