Quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - page 9
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I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strenght, happiness & misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own
Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.
Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.
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An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor.
Few rash of any modern nation have a proper sense of an aesthetical whole; they praise and blame by parts; they are charmed by passages. And who has greater reason to rejoice in this than actors, since the stage is ever but a patched and piecemeal matter?
The summit charms us, the steps to it do not; with the heights before our eyes, we like to linger in the plain. It is only a part of art that can be taught; but the artist needs the whole. He who is only half instructed speaks much and is always wrong; who knows it wholly is content with acting and speaks seldom or late.
What is now the foliage moving?
Air is still, and hush'd the breeze,
Sultriness, this fullness loving,
Through the thicket, from the trees.
Now the eye at once gleams brightly,
See! the infant band with mirth
Moves and dances nimbly, lightly,
As the morning gave it birth,
Flutt'ring two and two o'er earth.
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, power and grace.
Quite often, as life goes on, when we feel completely secure as we go on our way, we suddenly notice that we are trapped in error, that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by individuals, by objects, have dreamt up an affinity with them which immediately vanishes before our waking eye; and yet we cannot tear ourselves away, held fast by some power that seems incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, however, we become fully aware and realize that error as well as truth can move and spur us on to action.
A school of art or of anything else is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly.
Every need whose true satisfaction is denied leads by necessity to faith.
Mannerism always wants to be finished and doesn't enjoy the process. Genuine, truly great talent, however, finds its greatest satisfaction in the production.
And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing, doing and thinking--and these are the sum of all wisdom. . . . Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and breathing out.
When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation... when I consider all this... I am silent.
There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.
Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.
One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.
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I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.
