Imagine That

Fools and intelligent people are equally harmless. It is half-fools and the half-intelligent who are the most dangerous.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from Proverbs in Prose, in The Permanent Goethe, Thomas Mann (sel. & ed.).

What we do not understand, we do not possess.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ibid.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ibid.

Everything that liberates the mind without giving us control over ourselves is ruinous.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ibid.

One is never deceived, one deceives oneself.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ibid.

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science. Both, like all that is lofty and good, belong to the whole world and can be furthered only by the general free interaction of all those living in a given time, with constant regard to that which is preserved and known to us of the past.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ibid.

Everyone hears only what he understands.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ibid.

In the work of destruction all false arguments avail, but not in the work of construction. What is not true, does not build.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ibid.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
— Samuel Johnson, 1777.

LUCK is a crossroad where preparation and opportunity meet.
— Anon.

To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, you're overdoing it.
 — J. Jenkins.

Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not the fish they are after.
— Henry David Thoreau.