Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

I started out with this 'La Boheme' fantasy, but as you get older, the 'La Boheme' fantasy becomes less sexy, believe me.

When you're younger, love is this magic thing where the heavens open up. You live 40 years past that, you realize sometimes the heavens close down.

Love is not everything ... It is only when we are young that we think it is.

Every generous illusion of youth leaves a wrinkle as it departs. Experience is the successive disenchanting of the things of life; it is reason enriched with the heart's spoils.

I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young.

If a young person has any idealism at all, it's strongest about the time he finishes college.

In youth one believes in democracy, later on, one has to accept it.

Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.

I can never be the hero now. You have to be young and all that stuff. I used to be the hero.

That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen to much to believe it.' It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing.

I would enjoy experiencing the hollowness of success at first- hand.

O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.

My career is going better now than when I was younger. Now I get the part. Back then, I'd get the girl.

That's one of the first things that comes out of young people's mouths when they're in love. FOREVER. And that's cool, it's all good-until you get old enough to realize what forever is.

There is nothing new on earth / For a person who lives long and experiences much. / In my years of youthful wandering / I have seen crystallized people.

Dreams age faster than dreamers.

In youth, what disappointments of our own making: in age, what disappointments from the nature of things.

You know, I wish I wasn't so young when I made some of my movies, because I thought that's what the rest of my life was going to be like and I'd have all the time in the world to enjoy it. It wasn't and I didn't.

I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with itshard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it--the Bovary syndrome.

The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

Experience finds few of the scenes that lively hope designs.

A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Grown-up Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?