Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes About Study

• We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Religious, Writing, Morality

• You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Country, Study, Language

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Stuart Blackie (1883). “The Wisdom of Goethe”, Edinburgh, W. Blackwood

• All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know one's self. This is a strange demand which no one up to now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should. With all their study and effort, people are directed to what is outside, to the world about them, and they are kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that their purposes require. . . . How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Thinking, Self, People

• In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Education, Learning, Study

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.78, Ravenio Books

• When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it's alive; then they have the parts and the'be lost the whole, for the link that's missing was the living soul.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Missing, Soul, Alive

• If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Men, Law, Study

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.86, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is moat thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy boat among miners; and so with everything else.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Country, Teacher, Teaching

• The use of a thing is only a part of its significance. To know anything thoroughly, to have the full command of it in all its appliances, we must study it on its own account, independently of any special application.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Special, Use, Study

• In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Education, Science, Medicine

• Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, 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.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Beautiful, Song, Men

  Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre bk. 5, ch. 1 (1795 - 1796)

• Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Science, Knowing, Study

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