Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Nature Quotations

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Nature goes her own way and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

Nature has neither kernel nor shell; she is everything at once

Nature alone is illimitably rich, and Nature alone forms the great artist.

Nature is, after all, the only book that offers important content on every page.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

It is in human nature to relax, when not compelled by personal advantage or disadvantage.

Nature! We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her. Variant: NATURE! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her.

Nature is beneficent. I praise her and all her works. She is silent and wise. She is cunning, but for good ends. She has brought me here and will also lead me away. She may scold me, but she will not hate her work. I trust her.

The artist has a twofold relation to nature; he is at once her master and her slave.

This world could not exist if it were not so simple. The ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green again.

Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.

Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of beingcreated so as to understand them to some degree.

By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that theartist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.

Nature is so perfect that the Trinity couldn't have fashioned her any more perfect. She is an organ on which our Lord plays and the devil works the bellows.

The older I get the more I trust in the law according to which the rose and the lily bloom.

What is part of you, you cannot get rid of, even if you were to throw it away.

No man learns to know his inmost nature by introspection, for he rates himself sometimes too low, and often too high, by his own measurement. Man knows himself only by comparing himself with other men; it is life that touches his genuine worth.

Nature goes on her way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

There is no trifling with nature; it is always true, grave, and severe; it is always in the light, and the faults and errors fall to our share. It defies incompetency, but reveals its secrets to the competent, the truthful, and the pure.

People should talk less and draw more. Personally, I would like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say visually.

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

Nature reacts not only to physical disease, but also to moral weakness; when the danger increases; she gives us greater courage

For the nature of women is closely allied to art

To every one [Nature] appears in a form of his own. She hides herself in a thousand names and terms, and is always the same.

Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.

Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap.

Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

Nature is the living, visible garment of God.

Assuredly there is no more lovely worship of God than that for which no image is required, but which springs up in our breast spontaneously when nature speaks to the soul, and the soul speaks to nature face to face.

The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

Could we perfect human nature, we might also expect a perfect state of things.