Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent. I therefore show you only the best works and when you are grounded in these, you will have a standard for the rest, which you will know how to value, without overrating them. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent. I therefore show you only the best works and when you are grounded in these, you will have a standard for the rest, which you will know how to value, without overrating them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Related topics

best contemplation good overrating rest show standard taste value works

Related quotes

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

There is a power in public opinion in this country - and I thank God for it: for it is the most honest and best of all powers - which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow-citizens.

Martin Van Buren

Everyone confesses that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us; but most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

They wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is.

Thomas More

Nothing graces the Christian soul so much as mercy; mercy as shown chiefly towards the poor, that thou mayest treat them as sharers in common with thee in the produce of nature, which brings forth the fruits of the earth for use to all.

Ambrose