Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quality Quotations

Most men, even the most accomplished, are of limited faculties; every one sets a value on certain qualities in himself and others: these alone he is willing to favour, these alone will he have cultivated.

The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.

No matter what one says, you can recognize only those matters that are equal to you. Only rulers who possess extraordinary abilities will recognize and esteem properly extraordinary abilities in their subjects and servants.

People can only live with their equals, and not even with them; for in the long run they cannot tolerate that someone is their equal.

I have never looked at foreign countries or gone there but with the purpose of getting to know the general human qualities that are spread all over the earth in very different forms, and then to find these qualities again in my own country and to recognize and to further them.

So much has already been said about Shakespeare that there doesn't seem to be anything more to say; yet it is the quality of the spirit that it forever stimulates the spirit.

He who is and remains true to himself and to others has the most attractive quality of the greatest talent.

We are not all equal, nor can we be so.

One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.

Blood is a juice of rarest quality. [Ger., Blut ist ein ganz beondrer Saft.]

We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.