Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes About Pleasure

• Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Love, Life, Happiness

• People have a peculiar pleasure in making converts, that is, in causing others to enjoy what they enjoy, thus finding their own likeness represented and reflected back to them.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  People, Peculiar, Spirituality

• What is predestination? Answer: God is more powerful and wiser than we are, therefore he deals with us according to his pleasure.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  God, Powerful, Omnipotence

• The best pleasures of this world are not quite true.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  World, Pleasure, This World

• Take life too seriously, and what is it worth? If the morning wake us to no new joys, if the evening bring us not the hope of new pleasure, is it worthwhile to dress and undress?

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Morning, Joy, Dresses

• Take life too seriously, and what is it worth? If the morning wake us to no new joys, if the evening bring us not the hopes of new pleasures, is it worth while to dress and undress? Does the sun shine on me today that I may reflect on yesterday? That I may endeavor to foresee and control what can neither be foreseen nor controlled - the destiny of tomorrow?

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Life, Morning, Destiny

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (18??). “The Works of J. W. Von Goethe”

• My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Writing, Sleep, Giving

• In happy ignorance, I sighed for a world I did not know, where I hoped to find every pleasure and enjoyment which my heart could desire; and now, on my return from that wide world... how many disappointed hopes and unsuccessful plans have I brought back!

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Ignorance, Heart, Desire

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2016). “THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER (Literary Classics Series): Historical Romance Novel”, p.46, e-artnow

• If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Pleasure, Great Work, Lost

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.39, Ravenio Books

• Happy is it, indeed, for me that my heart is capable of feeling the same simple and innocent pleasure as the peasant whose table is covered with food of his own rearing, and who not only enjoys his meal, but remembers with delight the happy days and sunny mornings when he planted it, the soft evenings when he watered it, and the pleasure he experienced in watching its daily growth.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Morning, Heart, Simple

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “The Sorrows of Young Werther: Top Classic of German”, p.13, 谷月社

• Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy, must we also rob one another of the pleasures that any heart may permit itself now and then? And name me a person who in a bad mood will be decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him. Is it not rather an inner dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves that is always associated with envy aggravated by foolish conceit? We see people happy and not made happy by us, and that is unbearable.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Heart, Names, People

• He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Wish, Energy, May

• Pain and pleasure, good and evil, come to us from unexpected sources. It is not there where we have gathered up our brightest hopes, that the dawn of happiness breaks. It is not there where we have glanced our eye with affright, that we find the deadliest gloom. What should this teach us? To bow to the great and only Source of light, and live humbly and with confiding resignation.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Pain, Eye, Light

• One glance, one word from you gives more pleasure than all the wisdom of this world.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Sweet, Giving, World

• The misery that oppresses you lies not in your profession but in yourself! What man in the world would not find his situation intolerable if he chooses a craft, an art, indeed any form of life, without experiencing an inner calling? Whoever is born with a talent, or to a talent, must surely find in that the most pleasing of occupations! Everything on this earth has its difficult sides! Only some inner drive - pleasure, love - can help us overcome obstacles, prepare a path, and lift as out of the narrow circle in which others tread out their anguished, miserable existences!

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Lying, Men

• If you want to get pleasure out of life, you must attach value to the world.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  World, Want, Pleasure

• Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Pain, Men, May

• It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries--to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Sight, Discovery

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.74, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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