Conversations With Goethe Quotes

I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.

Hold your powers together for something good and let everything go that is for you without result and is not suited to you.

Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to the apt, the pure, and the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets.

Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.

The actor's realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it is known, his is the most ephemeral. At least, this is said in conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral. From the point of view of Sirius, Goethe's works in ten thousand years will be dust and his name forgotten.

Man is born not to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible.

One must be something in order to do something.

Sometimes when we are talking she lays her hand upon mine, and in the eagerness of conversation comes closer to me, and her balmy breath reaches my lips,—when I feel as if lightning

Ich bin in einer prächtigen Wohnung sogleich faul und untätig. Geringe Wohnung dagegen, wie dieses schlechte Zimmer, worin wir sind, ein wenig unordentlich ordentlich, ein wenig zigeunerhaft, ist für mich das Rechte; es lässt meiner inneren Natur volle Freiheit, tätig zu sein und aus mir selbst zu schaffen.

Our errors were endured because we found no beaten path; but from him who comes later into the world more is required; he must not be seeking and blundering, but should use the instructions of the old ones to proceed at once on the right path. It is not enough to take steps which may some day lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise.

It is a great folly to hope that other men will harmonize with us; I have never hoped this. I have always regarded each man as an independent individual, whom I endeavored to understand with all his peculiarities, but from whom I desired no further sympathy. In this way have I been enabled to converse with every man, and thus alone is produced the knowledge of various characters and the dexterity necessary for the conduct of life.

God can be worshipped in no more beautiful way than by the spontaneous welling up from one's breast of mutual converse with Nature.

Four very strange and truly poetic human beings in this century have attained mastery in prose, for which this century was not made otherwise—for lack of poetry, as I have suggested. Not including Goethe, who may fairly be claimed by the century that produced him, I regard only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy of being called masters of prose.35 93

It is a great folly to hope that other men will harmonize with us; I have never hoped this. I have always regarded each man as an independent individual, whom I endeavored to understand with all his peculiarities, but from whom I desired no further sympathy. In this way have I been enabled to converse with every man, and thus alone is produced the knowledge of various characters and the dexterity necessary for the conduct of life. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Inferior talents do not enjoy art for its own sake; while at work they have nothing before their eyes but the profit they hope to make when they have done. With such worldly views and tendencies, nothing great was ever yet produced.

Només vaig escriure poemes d'amor quan estimava. Com hauria pogut escriure cançons d'odi, sense odi? [...] Com hauria pogut jo, per a qui només tenen importància la cultura i la barbàrie, odiar una nació [la francesa] que figura entre les més cultes del món, i a la qual devia una part tan gran de la meva formació?

»Je höher ein Mensch,« sagte Goethe, »desto mehr steht er unter dem Einfluß der Dämonen, und er muß nur immer aufpassen, daß sein leitender Wille nicht auf Abwege gerate.« “The higher a man is,” said Goethe, “the more he is under the influence of demons, and he must take heed lest his guiding will counsel him to a wrong path”.

All that is great and skilful exists with the minority. There have been ministers who have had both king and people against them, and have carried out their great plans alone. It is not to be imagined that reason can ever be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular; but reason always remains the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

Renunciation, The Natural Daughter demonstrates, is the act of those who believe that their happiness is dependent on a power beyond their control which happens at a particular time, and for reasons which they cannot penetrate, not to permit them fulfilment, and this is the fundamental reason for Goethe's imperviousness to philosophies of history which do not acknowledge either the inscrutability of fate or the contingency of circumstance. The image of perfect beauty for Goethe is permanently recoverable, provided only that fate and circumstances are favourable, for they are the powers that direct the real world, in which alone fulfilment is worth having. Renunciation is the silence that acknowledges the absence from reality of the Ideal, and it may be interrupted only by the poem that celebrates the epiphany for which even the hope may not be uttered. Conversely, poems, being all of them occasional poems, and expressing delight in a glimpse of beauty recovered, thanks to favourable circumstances, are an emblem, or 'talisman', of a 'counter÷magic which works against the hostility of fate. Bitter though the disappointments of life may be for a noble nature, a poem expresses the miracle of a moment in which the Ideal enters reality once more and the powers that rule the world take on, however fleetingly, the constellation they had in paradise. In the poems he has still to write, Goethe can hope to glimpse again what he has renounced and take once more the road to Italy.

I, too, have been in the underworld, even as Odysseus, and I shall often be there again. Not sheep alone have I sacrificed that I might be able to converse with a few dead souls, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs did not reject my sacrifices: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With them I must come to terms when I have long wandered alone. I will let them agree and disagree with me, and listen to them when, in proving me right or wrong, they agree and disagree with one another. In all I say, decide, or think out for myself or for others, I fasten my eyes on those eight and see their eyes fastened on mine.

Beware of embarking on a great work. This is the mistake that our best minds make, the very people with the most talent and the fiercest ambition. I made the same mistake myself, and I know what it cost me. There was so much that came to nothing! The present demands its due; the thoughts and feelings that crowd in upon the poet every day need to be put into words, and so they should be. But if your mind is taken up with some great work, nothing else can get a look-in; all other thoughts are pushed aside, and you cannot even enjoy the ordinary pleasures of life. It requires a vast amount of exertion and mental effort just to shape and organize a great whole, and a vast amount of energy, plus a period of uninterrupted peace and quiet in one's life, to get it all down on paper in one continuous draft. But if you have picked the wrong subject to start with, then all your efforts are wasted; and if, furthermore, having undertaken something so large, you are not fully in command of your material in some of its parts, the whole thing will be unsatisfactory in places, and the critics will take you to task. So what the poet gets for so much effort and sacrifice is not reward and pleasure, but only stress and the undermining of his confidence. But if, on the other hand, the poet attends to the present moment each day, and writes with freshness and spontaneity about whatever comes his way, he is sure to produce something of value; and if, once in a while, something doesn't work out, then nothing is lost.

Die Nützlichkeitslehrer würden glauben, ihren Gott zu verlieren, wenn sie nicht den anbeten sollen, der dem Ochsen die Hörner gab, damit er sich verteidige. Mir aber möge man erlauben, daß ich den verehre, der in dem Reichtum seiner Schöpfung so groß war, nach tausendfältigen Pflanzen noch eine zu machen, worin alle übrigen enthalten, und nach tausendfältigen Tieren ein Wesen, das sie alle enthält: den Menschen. Man verehre ferner den, der dem Vieh sein Futter gibt und dem Menschen Speise und Trank, so viel er genießen mag; ich aber bete den an, der eine solche Produktionskraft in die Welt gelegt hat, daß, wenn nur der millionteste Teil davon ins Leben tritt, die Welt von Geschöpfen wimmelt, so daß Krieg, Pest, Wasser und Brand ihr nichts anzuhaben vermögen. Das ist mein Gott! The teachers of utility would think that they lost their God if they did not worship Him who gave the ox horns to defend itself. But I hope I may be allowed to worship Him who, in the abundance of His creation, was great enough, after making a thousand kinds of plants, to make one more, in which all the rest should be comprised; and after a thousand kinds of animals, a being which comprises them all—a man. Let people serve Him who gives to the beast his fodder, and to man meat and drink as much as he can enjoy. But I worship Him who has infused into the world such a power of production, that, when only the millionth part of it comes out into life, the world swarms with creatures to such a degree that war, pestilence, fire, and water cannot prevail against them. That is my God!

Seguramente la causalidad es el cemento de la naturaleza. En cualquier caso, las palabras son el cemento de la vida social: con palabras las personas no sólo se vinculan las unas con las otras y con el mundo, también, en gran medida, se «configuran» a sí mismas, a las otras personas, al mundo. Podemos referirnos a estos variados hechos con la expresión «poder significador» de las palabras. Metamorfosis decisiva: ese raro «poder» convierte a una aburrida cadena de sonidos en un lenguaje aclarador, apasionado, insustituible. Notoriamente, este «poder significador» posee diferentes funciones. Se adelantó: con el lenguaje se configuran las experiencias y se las trasmite. Me interesa detenerme, sin embargo, en dos atributos generales de ese «poder» en relación con las conversaciones. En primer lugar, cualquiera sea el tipo de conversación —desde la charla más chismosa y envenenadora hasta el intercambio científico más severo e imparcial; de la negociación más dura y práctica a la reflexión más desinteresada y contemplativa…— y cualesquiera sean las intenciones que operen, el poder significador tendrá, de modo inevitable, una dimensión personal. Esa dimensión es la co-función que acompaña a todas las otras funciones (configurar experiencias, trasmitirlas…) del lenguaje. Por ejemplo, quien escucha con atención reafirma, en principio, a su interlocutor: al menos, lo elimina como «nadie» y lo reconoce como «alguien». Lamentablemente, en segundo lugar, el poder significador posee ambigüedad sistemática: con las palabras articulamos las experiencias y, también, se las deforma o sabotea; trasmitimos informaciones verdaderas y falsas; sinceramente nos confesamos y nos encubrimos con engaños. De ahí la prudencia de pedir

13 juillet. Non, je ne me trompe pas ; je lis dans ses yeux noirs un véritable intérêt pour ma personne et pour mon sort. Je le sens, et, là-dessus, j’ose me fier à mon cœur, elle…. Oh ! pourrai-je, oserai-je exprimer en ces mots le bonheur céleste ?… Je sens que je suis aimé. Je suis aimé !… Et combien je me deviens cher à moi-même, combien…. J’ose te le dire, tu sauras me comprendre. Combien je suis relevé à mes propres yeux.depuis que j’ai son amour !…. Est-ce de la présomption ou le sentiment de ce que nous sommes réellement l’un pour l’autre ?… Je ne connais pas d’homme dont je craigne quelque chose dans le cœur de Charlotte, et pourtant, lorsqu’elle parle de son fiancé, qu’elle en parle avec tant de chaleur, tant d’amour…. je suis comme le malheureux que l’on dépouille de tous ses honneurs et ses titres, et à qui l’on retire son épée. 16 juillet. Ah ! quel frisson court dans toutes mes veines, quand, par mégarde, mes doigts touchent les siens, quand nos pieds se rencontrent sous la table ! Je me retire comme du feu, et une force secrète m’attire de nouveau…. Le vertige s’empare de tous mes sens. Et son innocence, son âme candide, ne sent pas combien ces petites familiarités me font souffrir. Si, dans la conversation, elle pose sa main sur la mienne, et si, dans la chaleur de l’entretien, elle s’approche de moi, en sorte que son haleine divine vienne effleurer mes lèvres…. je crois mourir, comme frappé de la foudre…. Wilhelm, et ce ciel, cette confiance, si j’ose jamais…. Tu m’entends…. Non, mon cœur n’est pas si corrompu. Faible ! bien faible !…. Et n’est-ce pas de la corruption ? Elle est sacrée pour moi. Tout désir s’évanouit en sa présence. Je ne sais jamais ce que j’éprouve, quand je suis auprès d’elle. Je crois sentir mon âme se répandre dans tous mes nerfs…. Elle a une mélodie, qu’elle joue sur le clavecin avec l’expression d’un ange, si simple et si charmante !… C’est son air favori : il chasse loin de moi troubles, peines, soucis, aussitôt qu’elle attaque la première note. De tout ce qu’on rapporte sur l’antique magie de la musique, rien n’est invraisemblable pour moi. Comme ce simple chant me saisit ! et comme souvent elle sait le faire entendre, à l’instant même où je m’enverrais volontiers une balle dans la tête !… le trouble et les ténèbres de mon âme se dissipent, et je respire plus librement.

a paying career out of her writing. She and Emerson talked about many things, including self-reliance, but most concentratedly about German literature. She, as well as Carlyle, was now absorbed in Goethe’s writings and was working on a translation of Eckermann’s great Conversations with Goethe. Emerson was working on his (German, increasingly convinced, as were other friends such as Hedge from Bangor, and Parker and Ripley from Boston, that the most interesting intellectual and artistic currents, the really vital ideas seemed recently to have been coming out of Germany. No one, they thought, would be able to understand the nineteenth century without taking Kant, Herder, Hegel, and Goethe into account. Until one had read them, one’s basic education was not complete.

Bildungsroman’ is a literary term taken directly from the German. It refers to a novel which charts the education and development of its hero or heroine as he or she comes to maturity. Famous examples include Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young Werther] (1774), Austen’s Emma (1816), and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). We have already noted the autobiographical nuances of Dickens’s novel, and critics have discerned autobiographical qualities in other Bildungsromans, so it may not come as a surprise that the term can provide a useful, general way of thinking about, or planning, the structure of a life writing narrative. The Bildungsroman is particularly closely related to a sub-genre of life writing: the conversion narrative, or spiritual account.

Yes, I can quite well believe that; I’m sure I shall never wish to escape you. But you are a mysterious Master.” “You seem to me rather an exacting servant. I have shaped myself like a jobbing gardener, I am sitting on the grass beside you (I’ll have one of your apples if I may. They are a fruit I am particularly fond of), I am doing everything in my power to be agreeable and reassuring… What more do you want?” “That is exactly what I complain of. You are too lifelike to be natural; why, it might be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann. No! if I am really a witch, treat me as such. Satisfy my curiosity. Tell me about yourself.” “Tell me first what you think,” he answered. “I think”—she began cautiously (while he hid his cards it would not do to show all hers)—“I think you are a kind of black knight, wandering about and succoring decayed gentlewomen.” “There are warlocks too, remember.” “I can’t take warlocks so seriously, not as a class. It is we witches who count. We have more need of you. Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance. Do you understand?” He was silent. She continued, slowly, knitting her brows in the effort to make clear to herself and him the thought that was in her mind: “It’s like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. In places like Bedfordshire, the sort of country one sees from the train. You know. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all. And all the time being thrust further down into dullness when the one thing all women hate is to be thought dull.

Love loves and in loving always looks beyond what it has in hand and possesses. The driving impulse [*Triebimpuls*] which arouses may tire out; love itself does not tire. This *sursum corda* which is the essence of love may take on fundamentally different forms at different elevations in the various regions of value. The sensualist is struck by the way the pleasure he gets from the objects of his enjoyment gives him less and less satisfaction while his driving impulse stays the same or itself increases as he flies more and more rapidly from one object to the next. For this water makes one thirstier, the more one drinks. Conversely, the satisfaction of one who loves spiritual objects, whether things or persons, is always holding out new promise of satisfaction, so to speak. This satisfaction by nature increases more rapidly and is more deeply fulfilling, while the driving impulse which originally directed him to these objects or persons holds constant or decreases. The satisfaction always lets the ray of the movement of love peer out a little further beyond what is presently given. In the highest case, that of love for a person, this movement develops the beloved person in the direction of ideality and perfection appropriate to him and does so, in principle, beyond all limits. However, in both the satisfaction of pleasure and the highest personal love, the same *essentially infinite process* appears and prevents both from achieving a definitive character, although for opposite reasons: in the first case, because satisfaction diminishes; in the latter, because it increases. No reproach can give such pain and act so much as a spur on the person to progress in the direction of an aimed-at perfection as the beloved's consciousness of not satisfying, or only partially satisfying, the ideal image of love which the lover brings before her―an image he took from her in the first place. Immediately a powerful jolt is felt in the core of the soul; the soul desires to grow to fit this image. "So let me seem, until I become so." Although in sensual pleasure it is the *increased variety* of the objects that expresses this essential infinity of the process, here it is the *increased depth of absorption* in the growing fullness of one object. In the sensual case, the infinity makes itself felt as a self-propagating unrest, restlessness, haste, and torment: in other words, a mode of striving in which every time something repels us this something becomes the source of a new attraction we are powerless to resist. In personal love, the felicitous advance from value to value in the object is accompanied by a growing sense of repose and fulfillment, and issues in that positive form of striving in which each new attraction of a suspected value results in the continual abandonment of one already given. New hope and presentiment are always accompanying it. Thus, there is a positively valued and a negatively valued *unlimitedness of love*, experienced by us as a potentiality; consequently, the striving which is built upon the act of love is unlimited as well. As for striving, there is a vast difference between Schopenhauer's precipitate "willing" born of torment and the happy, God-directed "eternal striving" in Leibniz, Goethe's Faust, and J. G. Fichte." ―from_Ordo Amoris_

Now you've seen a hero," he said. "And that's worth something." —Eckermann, CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE

One hath said, "As oft as I have gone among men, so oft have I returned less a man." This is what we often experience when we have been long time in conversation. For it is easier to be altogether silent than it is not to exceed in word. It is easier to remain hidden at home than to keep sufficient guard upon thyself out of doors. He, therefore, that seeketh to reach that which is hidden and spiritual, must go with Jesus "apart from the multitude." No man safely goeth abroad who loveth not to rest

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.

This notion of the artist as better than other people is irritating, I admit. I remember how annoyed I was with myself, as a young man, when I first came across it, I think in connection with pronouncements by and about Goethe, Proust, and Ezra Pound. I felt, I think rightly that the people I know -my parents and friends- were as high-minded and decent as any poet. The poet's business, it seemed to me, is to celebrate or at least understand those people, not arrogantly raise himself above them, pompously proclaim himself the Romantic "great man" who imposes on the rest of poor miserable humanity the duty of groping through darkness, hunting out his footsteps. I would not now take that opinion back, but I might temper it a little. A thousand times since then I've been in conversations where no one seemed to care about the truth, where people argued merely to win, refused to listen or try to understand, threw in irrelevancies -some anecdote without conceivable bearing, some mere ego-flower. A thousand times I have heard some person -some casual acquaintance about whom I had no strong feeling- cruelly vilified, and have found that to rise in defense of mere fairness is to become, suddenly, the enemy. I have witnessed repeatedly, university battles in which no one on any side would stoop to plain truth. I have seen repeatedly, how positions which at first glance seem stirringly noble and idealistic, for example, the battle led by Cesar Chavez in California -can in an instant turn cunning and dishonest, seizing whatever means seem necessary, imagining the hoped-for end can remained untainted. I need not speak of the Republican and Democratic parties, mockers of the ordinary citizen's ideal, of America's support of tyranny and corruption, or of the astonishing greed and moral indifference of both public officials and some members of public, whether the payoff be bribery and preferment or those welfare checks drawn by the affluent in Florida on vacation. And sitting in rooms with other artists -sculptors, painters, composers, writers, people whose work I believe to be serious and authentic- I have noticed how frequently, if not infallibly, they react to all these varieties of falsity with stammering, fist-banging rage. In the redness of their faces, the pitch of their voices (not all, of course, shout; some speak quietly, a few make bitter jokes), these artists are not different from the typical Milwaukee banker speaking angrily of the Jews, or the racial fanatic speaking angrily of niggers or honkies; but what these artists care about -what they rave or mourn or bitterly joke about- is the forms of truth: justice, fairness, accuracy.

Goethe and Madame de Staël, neither of whom ever met the philosophe, knew that, by reputation, no one’s conversation ever surpassed Diderot’s in liveliness, strength, wit, variety, and grace.

The Journey to Hades. I too have been in the underworld, even as Odysseus, and I shall often be there again. Not sheep alone have I sacrificed, that I might be able to converse with a few dead souls, but not even my own blood have I spared. There were four pairs who responded to me in my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With them I have to come to terms. When I have long wandered alone, I will let them prove me right or wrong; to them will I listen, if they prove each other right or wrong. In all that I say, conclude, or think out for myself and others, I fasten my eyes on those eight and see their eyes fastened on mine. May the living forgive me if I look upon them at times as shadows, so pale and fretful, so restless and, alas, so eager for life. Those eight, on the other hand, seem to me so living that I feel as if even now, after their death, they could never become weary of life. But eternal vigour of life is the important point: what matters "eternal life” or indeed life at all?

Die Natur versteht gar keinen Spaß, sie ist immer wahr, immer ernst, immer strenge, sie hat immer recht, und die Fehler und Irrtümer sind immer des Menschen. Den Unzulänglichen verschmäht sie, und nur dem Zulänglichen, Wahren und Reinen ergibt sie sich und offenbart ihm ihre Geheimnisse.

Die Natur versteht gar keinen Spaß, sie ist immer wahr, immer ernst, immer strenge, sie hat immer recht, und die Fehler und Irrtümer sind immer des Menschen.