Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749–1832 · German writer, artist, natural scientist and politician

Topics: learning, creativity, science, complexity

• The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before — you've just got to try to think it all over again.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Theories usually result from the precipitate reasoning of an impatient mind which would like to be rid of phenomena and replaces them with images, concepts, indeed often with mere words.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Hypotheses are scaffoldings erected in front of a building and then dismantled when the building is finished. They are indispensable for the workman; but you mustn't mistake the scaffolding for the building.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• When you see some evil you proceed to immediate action, you make an immediate attack to cure the symptom.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• You really only know when you know little. Doubt grows with knowledge.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• The first and last thing demanded of genius is love of truth.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe