If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
Categories: acceptance expectations vision leadership mentorship education learning parenting growth mentoring challenge spur self-improvement

The man is born with a talent which he has meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations
Categories: talent ability capacity work success happiness joy meaning fulfillment purpose

The deed is everything, the glory naught.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
Categories: work effort action success achievement recognition

The best genius is that which absorbs and assimilates everything without doing the least violence to its fundamental destiny--that which we call character--but rather improving it and enhancing it as far as possible...Through training, instruction, contemplation, success, failure, advancement, hindrance, and ever more contemplation, the organs of man, in their instinctive, free activity, unite the acquired with the innate to produce a harmonious unity that astonished the world.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Permanent Goethe Edited, Selected and with an Introduction by Thomas Mann
Categories: change introspection learning meditation personal growth failure mistakes success meditation achievement genius brilliance creativity

A leaf that is destined to grow large is full of grooves and wrinkles at the start. Now if one has no patience and wants it smooth offhand like a willow leaf, there is trouble ahead.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
Categories: personal growth imperfections adversity character

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart
Categories: character choice love

One has only to grow older to become more tolerant. I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Words for All Occasions
Categories: aging wisdom error mistake forgiveness

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations
Categories: mentoring parenting relationships growth nurturing

Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying, and Quotation
Categories: talents skills character growth

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Forbes Book of Business Quotations: 14,266 Thoughts on the Business of Life
Categories: balance beauty appreciation

So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Categories: balance

Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Categories: character

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Categories: criticism

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Categories: imagination

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Categories: language

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
Categories: poetry

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Categories: stupidity

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust
Categories: trust