Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes on God
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's relation to God was personal, unorthodox, and bound up with his reverence for nature, art, and knowledge, and the quotes gathered here reflect it. In an early letter Goethe rested his happiness on faith in the divine love that once walked the earth bearing the name of Jesus Christ. Yet he also located religion in the highest human achievements, writing in Wilhelm Meister that whoever possesses science and art possesses religion too, and that whoever lacks both has the more need of it. Goethe treated the ultimate questions of God, man, and world as a standing mystery, easily stated and never solved, and he found the divine present in the living forms of nature. Drawn from his poetry, novels, and letters, these passages present a God approached through love, art, and wonder rather than doctrine.
Quotes
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“I hold to faith in the divine love — which, so many years ago for a brief moment in a little corner of the earth, walked about as a man bearing the name of Jesus Christ — as the foundation on which alone my happiness rests.”
(1773), translated by Albert Schweizer in Goethe: Five Studies (1961), Beacon Press, p. 53 -
“Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces ! Streets, say a word! Spirit of this place, are you dumb? All things are alive in your sacred walls Eternal Rome, it's only for me all is still.”
Roman Elegies(1789) | Elegy 1 -
“The folly! Every man in turn would still His own peculiar notions magnify! If Islam mean submission to God’s will, May we all live in Islam, and all die.”
West–östlicher Divan(West–Eastern Diwan)(1819/1827) | The West–Eastern Divan , translated by Edward Dowden, VI. Book of Maxims, p. 86. -
“Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, / Hat auch Religion / Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt / Der habe Religion”
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre(Apprenticeship)(1786–1830) | Who science has and art He has religion too Who neither of them owns Religion is his due. As quoted in Jost Lemmerich's "Science and Conscience: The Life of James Franck" (2011), p. 261. Variant trans -
“Is it so big a mystery what god and man and world are? No! but nobody knows how to solve it so the mystery hangs on.”
Venetian Epigrams(1790) | As translated by Jerome Rothenberg -
“The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.”
Elective Affinities(1809) | Bk. II, Ch. 3