Quotes About Goethe

Poetry… it consumed Sappho's young years, it nourished Goethe's old age. Drug, the Greeks called it, both poison and medicine.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

There are no means of safety against superior qualities of another person but to love him.

When he comes to the door he always looks mocking and half-way angry. You can see he has sympathy for nothing. It's written on his forehead that he can love no one.

Men grieve [Mephistopheles] so with the days of their lamenting, [he] even hate[s] to plague them with [his] torments.

Viewed from the heights of reason, all life looks like some malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

Todo lo que ha ocurrido es sólo una parábola. Lo que es inalcanzable se convierte en suceso. Lo que es indescriptible se ha realizado aquí. Lo eterno-femenino nos permite avanzar.

Ele é um homem de raciocinio, mas de raciocinio completamente comum; a sua compahia nao me entretem mais do que a leitura de um livro bem escrito

The German writer Goethe said that the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music—that to look upon a thing is to hear it. Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architecture is frozen music. 131

Where Newton was reductionist, Goethe was holistic. Newton broke light apart and found the most basic physical explanation for color. Goethe walked through flower gardens and studied paintings, looking for a grand, all-encompassing explanation. Newton made his theory of color fit a mathematical scheme for all of physics. Goethe, fortunately or unfortunately, abhorred mathematics.

Feigenbaum persuaded himself that Goethe had been right about color. Goethe's ideas resemble a facile notion, popular among psychologists, that makes a distinction between hard physical reality and the variable subjective perception of it. The colors we perceive vary from time to time and from person to person—that much is easy to say.

It was the perception of color, to Goethe, that was universal and objective. What scientific evidence was there for a definable real-world quality of redness independent of our perception?

I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?

The German writer Goethe said that the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music—that to look upon a thing is to hear it. Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architecture is frozen music.

Given a choice of order or justice, he often said, paraphrasing Goethe, he would choose order. He had seen too clearly the consequences of disorder.

The Germans think that strength must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty; then they submit with fervor and admiration: they are suddenly rid of their pitiful weakness and their sensitivity for every naught, and they devoutly enjoy terror. That there is strength in mildness and stillness, they do not believe easily. They miss strength in Goethe …!—XI, 112.

he would be permitted to say to the moment "Abide, you are so fair!" And to share Goethe's faith - for it was no mere confidence in fame but a cosmic faith: "The traces of my earthly days/No aeons can impair.

I was walking home from the theatre with Goethe this evening when we saw a small boy in a plum colored waistcoat. Youth, Goethe said, is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility

Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

Maxims and Reflections by Goethe:

How I yearn to throw myself into endless space, said Maggie, and float above the awful abyss. Both Baedecker and Gavin turned to stare at her. Goethe, she said as if in self-defense.

The renouncing of life and immediacy, which was the premise for the progress of natural science since Newton, formed the real basis for the bitter struggle which Goethe waged against the physical optics of Newton. It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as unimportant: there is much significance in one of the most outstanding men directing all his efforts to fighting against the development of Newtonian optics.

It was at that battle that Goethe, present on the staff of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, made (we are told) a famous remark: "From today and from this place begins a new epoch in the history of the world.

Nietzsche, like Goethe, held no high opinion of the German people,* and in other ways, too, the outpourings of this megalomaniacal genius differ from those of the chauvinistic German thinkers of the nineteenth century.