Quotes About Goethe

From 1781, by which time Goethe had been in Weimer for six years, he confided to Charlotte that he no longer felt able to address her as "Sie," and must use the more intimate "du." This brought about a sea change. As one critic put it, Goethe's letters now became "prose poems of happy love with few parallels in any literature.

The remark of Goethe is as profound as it is true: "The conflict of faith and unbelief remains the proper, the only, the deepest theme of the history of the world and mankind, to which all others are subordinated.

I have never bothered or asked", Goethe said to Friedrich Soret in 1830, "in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."35

Goethe says that "der Menschheit bestes Tell" ("the best part of man") is this experience, the Schaudern ("shudder")20—it's a kind of noumenal ripple, a realization of how momentary you are in this vast explosion that is the universe, and that's what you get through Dionysus.

Night knew no bounds. Goethe, on a moonlit evening in Naples, was "overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.

Goethe used his imagination wisely when confronted with difficulties and predicaments. His biographers point out that he was accustomed to fill many hours quietly holding imaginary conversations. It is well known that his custom was to imagine one of his friends before him in a chair answering him in the right way.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

the importance of preserving the integrity of a non-scientific form of understanding, the kind of understanding characteristic of the arts and the kind of understanding that Goethe, Spengler and Wittgenstein sought to protect from the encroachment of science and scientism.

Perhaps Goethe never found the right woman.

Goethe, than whom few of us can hope to live a fuller or more interesting life, stated on his deathbed – he was eighty-two at the time – that he had only ever felt happiness in his life for one quarter of an hour.

Man will return to his origins. Goethe has finally become as squiggly as the city of his fathers.

Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous.

Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness, and especially for yellow-red.

I hate all bungling as I do sin, but particularly bungling in politics, which leads to the misery and ruin of many thousands and millions of people.

Humor is one of the elements of genius--admirable as an adjunct; but as soon as it becomes dominant, only a surrogate for genius.

Music is the same to me as it was to Goethe - a pleasant noise. I am an eye man, not an ear man.

If it were Hegel , I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now!"

As Andersen told it, the tale was not for young children, not even called 'The Little'-just, 'The Mermaid.' It's about love and grief, a myth of longing and sacrifice, far closer, say, to Goethe's Parable than to any jovial folktale, much less to today's manufactured juvenile distractions.

The friendship of two young people,' says Goethe somewhere, 'is delightful when the girl likes to learn and the boy to teach.' It will perhaps be said that this virgin curiosity is no more than unconscious physical desire; but what does it matter, if this desire sharpens the mind and deadens conceit?

Goethe epitomizes what was known in the Renaissance as the Ideal of the Universal Man—a person so steeped in all forms of knowledge that his mind grows closer to the reality of nature itself and sees secrets that are invisible to most people.

And Törless could not think but that the problems of philosophy had been solved once and for all by Kant, rendering that a pointless pursuit, just as he also thought it was not worth writing poetry after Goethe and Schiller.

Needless to say that in this beautiful poem Goethe expresses the core of his concept of investigating nature.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.