Goethe - Epigrams on possession, happiness, religion, love, literature, nature and knowledge

• We cannot possess what we do not understand.
• Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced.
• Since I have heard often enough that everyone in the end has his own religion, nothing seemed more natural to me than to fashion my own.
• Love's torments sought a place of rest,
  Where all might drear and lonely be;
  They found ere long my desert breast,
  And nestled in its vacancy.
• The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
• Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.
• We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt enters.

Goethe - Every Day (epigram)

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

The Secret of the Universe

This may sound a little strange, but it is not quite so paradoxical as the case of Jacob Boehme, to whom Jove's thunderbolt revealed the secret of the universe while he was looking at a pewter bowl.

[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, p 49, Penguin 60s Classics] [written on 8 October 1786]

Our times are worse than we think

The art of mosaic, which gave the Ancients their paved floors and the Christians the vaulted Heaven of their churches, has now been degraded to snuffboxes and bracelets. Our times are worse than we think.

[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, p 48, Penguin 60s Classics] [written on 8 October 1786]

(Always "our times" are the most degraded and the worst. It wasn't true then Wolfgang (witness your true self) and it isn't true now).