“The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.”
More from Goethe on Life
“We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.”
“Nothing is more highly to be prized than the value of each day”
“Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.”
“Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath.”
“A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.”
“The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.”
“If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.”
Others on Life
Jonathan Safran Foer
22 quotes“One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second”
Mitch Albom
18 quotes“Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
16 quotes“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
Henry Miller
15 quotes“We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.”
Lord Byron
14 quotes“The great art of life is sensation to feel that we exist even in pain.”
Cormac McCarthy
14 quotes“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn...”
Virginia Woolf
14 quotes“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Joseph Campbell
14 quotes“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive...”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
13 quotes“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”
Søren Kierkegaard
13 quotes“Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.”
Margaret Atwood
13 quotes“Surviving Is the only warWe can afford”
Sarah Dessen
13 quotes“All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control....”