Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.

There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily

One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it

It has often occurred to me that a seeker after truth has to be silent.

We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it

The searching-out and thorough investigation of truth ought to be the primary study of man.

Those who seek the truth run the risk of finding it.

The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust.

I found that most people don't really want to know the truth. There are plenty of people who want to know the truth on their terms or require that the truth be contained within certain boundaries of comfort. But truth can never be known this way. You have to seek truth from a place of not knowing, and that can be a very threatening place because we think we already know the truth or we are afraid of what the truth might be.

If we can get to the truth, we can change anything.

We are all afraid of the truth.

As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived and dishonest-but the myth-persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Mythology distracts us everywhere.

You can't conquer reality by running away from it.

The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.

Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren't afraid of truth.

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

One and all have to face reality now.

It takes courage to recognize the real as opposed to the convenient.

The more false we destroy, the more room there will be for the true.

Freedom just around the corner for you, but with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.' No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.

When one first seeks the truth, one separates oneself from it.