Quotes About Goethe

As an escape, I suppose, I read some Goethe letters this afternoon. It was reassuring to be reminded of the devastation of Germany that Napoleon wrought. Apparently Jena, near Goethe's Weimar, was pretty roughly handled by the French troops. But through it all the great poet never loses hope. He keeps saying that the Human Spirit will triumph, the European spirit. But today, where is the European spirit in Germany? Dead.… Dead…

Goethe says: truth repels, but delusion attracts, because truth presents us as limited, while delusion presents us as omnipotent. Moreover, truth repels because it is fragmented and incomprehensible, while delusion is coherent and logical.

I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.

I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.

Per Goethe [...] l'innaturale probabilmente non esisteva: la natura goethiana abbraccia e avvolge ogni cosa ed è lei che muove e crea, con elusiva ironia, tutte le forme, pure quelle che sembrano negarla e che agli uomini appaiono "innaturali". (Danubio, p.37)

The notion that scientific truth directly fosters moral goodness — a legacy of gifted but in this respect misguided amateurs of science like Diderot and Goethe — was receding in the nineteenth century before positivistic procedures which sharply differentiated facts from values.

In some ways this was Goethe's greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where "the real joints of nature" are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine "imagination, observation and thought in the act of language.

Like an existentialist, I will infer my state from the actions I perform. Thought follows deed, as Mussolini taught. In Anfang war die Tat, as Goethe says in Faust. In the beginning was the deed, not the word.

Goethe, the great poet-philosopher, once wrote: "I find more and more that it is well to be on the side of the minority, since it is always the more intelligent.

From the beginning, about the rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance of life; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that passion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less richly charged.

The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants.

For five hundred years after Walther's death - until Goethe - no German lyric poet was his equal.

I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.

Na een paar maanden constateert hij [Goethe] dat het hem zwaar valt rekenschap af te leggen van zijn verblijf, want - zo noteert hij op 25 januari 1787 - 'zoals men merkt dat de zee steeds dieper wordt naarmate men haar verder opvaart, zo vergaat het ook mij bij het beschouwen van deze stad'. Zich Rome werkelijk toe-eigenen vergt een mensenleven - zo verzucht de auteur enkele maanden later - 'of zelfs het leven van vele mensen, die stap voor stap van elkaar leren.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. "We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any "blueness." Above all, I want to stop missing you.

Goethe describes blue as lively color, but one devoid of gladness. "It may be said to disturb rather than enliven.". Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionallu incapable of loving you back?

Humans fear reason, but they ought to fear stupidity- for reason can be hard, but stupidity can be fatal.

Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear -- And struck his finger on the place, And said -- Thou ailest here, and here.

You remember what Goethe said in the moment of his death [...] 'More light.' Death opens up the way to more light, and carries us to those regions where we stand face to face with eternal Beauty and Truth. I remember the time when I read Goethe's poems with you, and I hope you also remember those happy days when we were so near to each other spiritually speaking. Iqbals Briefwechsel mit Emma Wegenast (S. 45, Iqbal and Goethe, Christina Oesterheld)

To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: "the mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.

Von Goethe stammt auch das tiefe Wort, daß der Mathematiker nur insofern vollkommen sei, als er das Schöne des Wahren in sich empfinde.

To Goethe we owe the profound saying: 'The mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true'. Here we feel how nearly the secret of number is related to the secret of artistic creation. Mathematics, then, are an art. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day.