Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

The Ignorance the people live in leads them to commit mistakes against their own happiness

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

I recognize that I'm human, and the older I get, the more I realize how fallible I am, how fallible we all are.

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.

Man is nature's sole mistake.

The human condition is not perfect. We are not perfect specimens, any of us. We're not robots.

If religion had a good purpose, then man would have created something great. But we're man: we mess up everything. We mess up nature. We mess up God. We take what is given to us and make it into what we think it should be.

The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.

Tis this desire of bending all things to our own purposes which turns them into confusion and is the chief source of every error in our lives.

No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That's the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That's part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work on it.

The measures have not yet been devised which can permanently protect men from their folly.

any system, in which the final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are human, is doomed to failure because it deifies human beings by designating others than God as lords over men.

I like people that are real people. Real people are broad; they make mistakes.

Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.

Unfortunately, some of our greatest tribulations are the result of our own foolishness and weakness and occur because of our own carelessness or transgression.

I believe we do have a great intelligence service. Is it good enough in all circumstances? Of course not. We live in the human condition. We try to make it better each day.

Our biggest risk is ourselves.

Noir deals with the disenfranchised: people who can't catch a break under normal circumstances. In noir books, you root for these people, but you know they are going to fail. That's what makes them so compellingly human. I can relate to that kind of stuff.

To be human is to err, isn't it?

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds.