Goethe Famous Quotes

I didn't ask for this role, but I'll play it. Now go do your best. Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid. Goethe said that. It's not too late for you to become a person of substance, Russell. Please get my son home safely. You know, I'm glad we spoke.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

A famous line from Goethe: "On top of the world, or in the depths of despair."]

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.

In 1593, soon after Marlowe’s murder, a troop of English actors brought a production of the Tragical History of Doctor Faustus to Germany. Through some metamorphosis, the tragedy became a comedy, and the comedy was then transformed into a puppet show. It was more than likely in this form that the young Goethe first came upon what would become his most famous work.

When Marsyas was 'torn from the scabbard of his limbs' - DELLA VAGINA DELLA MEMBRE SUE, to use one of Dante's most terrible Tacitean phrases - he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions of Chopin's music. It is in the discontent that haunts Burne- Jones's women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of 'the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,' and the 'famous final victory,' in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him, though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for THYRSIS or to sing of the SCHOLAR GIPSY, it is the reed that he has to take for the rendering of his strain. But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be. Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is none.

One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: “There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!” Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play,

saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own.

My darling son: depression at your age is more common than you might think. I remember it very strongly in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I was about twenty-six and felt like killing myself. I think the winter, the cold, the lack of sunshine, for us tropical creatures, is a trigger. And to tell you the truth, the idea that you might soon unpack your bags here, having chucked in all your European plans, makes your mother and me as happy as could be. You have more than earned the equivalent of any university 'degree' and you have used your time so well to educate yourself culturally and personally that if university bores you, it is only natural. Whatever you do from here on in, whether you write or don't write, whether you get a degree or not, whether you work for your mother, or at El Mundo, or at La Ines, or teaching at a high school, or giving lectures like Estanislao Zuleta, or as a psychoanalyst to your parents, sisters and relatives, or simply being Hector Abad Faciolince, will be fine. What matters is that you don't stop being what you have been up till now, a person, who simply by virtue of being the way you are, not for what you write or don't write, or for being brilliant or prominent, but just for being the way you are, has earned the affection, the respect, the acceptance, the trust, the love, of the vast majority of those who know you. So we want to keep seeing you in this way, not as a future great author, or journalist or communicator or professor or poet, but as the son, brother, relative, friend, humanist, who understands others and does not aspire to be understood. It does not matter what people think of you, and gaudy decoration doesn't matter, for those of us who know you are. For goodness' sake, dear Quinquin, how can you think 'we support you (...) because 'that boy could go far'? You have already gone very far, further than all our dreams, better than everything we imagined for any of our children. You should know very well that your mother's and my ambitions are not for glory, or for money, or even for happiness, that word that sounds so pretty but is attained so infrequently and for such short intervals (and maybe for that very reason is so valued), for all our children, but that they might at least achieve well-being, that more solid, more durable, more possible, more attainable word. We have often talked of the anguish of Carlos Castro Saavedra, Manuel Meija Vallejo, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, and so many quasi-geniuses we know. Or Sabato or Rulfo, or even Garcia Marquez. That does not matter. Remember Goethe: 'All theory (I would add, and all art), dear friend, is grey, but only the golden tree of life springs ever green.' What we want for you is to 'live'. And living means many better things than being famous, gaining qualifications or winning prizes. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. Only now, when all that has passed, have I felt really happy. And part of that happiness is Cecilia, you, and all my children and grandchildren. Only the memory of Marta Cecilia tarnishes it. I believe things are that simple, after having gone round and round in circles, complicating them so much. We should do away with this love for things as ethereal as fame, glory, success... Well, my Quinquin, now you know what I think of you and your future. There's no need for you to worry. You are doing just fine and you'll do better, and when you get to my age or your grandfather's age and you can enjoy the scenery around La Ines that I intend to leave to all of you, with the sunshine, heat and lush greenery, and you'll see I was right. Don't stay there longer than you feel you can. If you want to come back I'll welcome you with open arms. And if you regret it and want to go back again, we can buy you another return flight. A kiss from your father.

Sensitivity to dopamine also declines because dopamine receptors, anticipating high levels, have down-regulated. This may explain Goethe’s famous remark, ‘Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days.

The Thursday Circle covered a multitude of topics, including religion, ethics, politics, and culture. Part of the requirement for the group entailed attending cultural events. One week Bonhoeffer gave a talk on Wagner’s Parsifal and then took the group to see the opera itself. There were questions of Christian apologetics: “Did God create the world? . . . What is the purpose of prayer? . . . Who is Jesus Christ?” There were ethical questions: “Is there such a thing as a necessary lie?” They discussed the Christian perspective on Jews, on rich and poor, and on political parties. One week the topic was “the gods of the ancient Germans,” and another week it was “the gods of the Negro tribes.” One week the topic was “famous poets and their God (Goethe, Schiller),” and another it was “famous painters and their God (Grünewald, Dürer, Rembrandt).” They discussed mystery cults, the Muslim faith, music, Luther, and the Catholic church.*

In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that “something within him” discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him—they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.

Deeply ambivalent also is the image of fire in carnival. It is a fire that simultaneously destroys and renews the world. In European carnivals there was almost always a special structure (usually a vehicle adorned with all possible sorts of gaudy carnival trash) called "hell," and at the close of carnival this "hell" was triumphantly set on fire (sometimes this carnival "hell" was ambivalently linked with a horn of plenty). Characteristic is the ritual of "moccoli" in Roman carnival: each participant in the carnival carried a lighted candle ("a candle stub"), and each tried to put out another's candle with the cry "Sia ammazzato!" ("Death to thee!"). In his famous description of Roman carnival (in Italienische Reise)h Goethe, striving to uncover the deeper meaning behind carnival images, relates a profoundly symbolic little scene: during "moccoli" a boy puts out his father's candle with the cheerful carnival cry: "Sia ammazzato il Signore Padre!" [that is, "death to thee, Signor Father!"]

Hope is harder to come by these days, and I find hope more easily in brightness. "More light,"Goethe famously called on his deathbed, and I understand. In light, there is human companionship, bird song, a sense—however illusory—of forward motion. In light, the horizon extends before us, a tableau of endless possibility, while darkness allows all manner of doubts to burble up. When we have lost our certainty of purpose, our very understanding of ourselves, we speak of enduring a dark night of the soul. How much easier is it to give into gloom, even dejection, when it is the darkness that feels endless.

The work of Hafiz became known to the West largely through the passion of Goethe. His enthusiasm deeply affected Ralph Waldo Emerson, who then translated Hafiz in the nineteenth century. Emerson said of Hafiz, 'Hafiz is a poet for poets,; and Goethe remarked, 'Hafiz has no peer.'Hafiz's poems were also admired by such diverse notables as Nietzsche and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wonderful character Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz; Garcia Lorca praised him, the famous composer Johannes Brahs was so touched by his verse he put several lines into compositions, and even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted the works of Hafiz in times of need. The range of Hafiz's verse in indeed stunning. He says, 'I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through--listen to this music.' In another poem Hafiz playfully sings, 'Look at the smile on the earth's lips this morning, she laid again with me last night.

The work of Hafiz became known to the West largely through the passion of Goethe. His enthusiasm deeply affected Ralph Waldo Emerson, who then translated Hafiz in the nineteenth century. Emerson said of Hafiz, 'Hafiz is a poet for poets,; and Goethe remarked, 'Hafiz has no peer.' Hafiz's poems were also admired by such diverse notables as Nietzsche and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wonderful character Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz; Garcia Lorca praised him, the famous composer Johannes Brahms was so touched by his verse he put several lines into compositions, and even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted the works of Hafiz in times of need. The range of Hafiz's verse in indeed stunning. He says, 'I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through--listen to this music.' In another poem Hafiz playfully sings, 'Look at the smile on the earth's lips this morning, she laid again with me last night.

The work of Hafiz became known to the West largely through the passion of Goethe. His enthusiasm deeply affected Ralph Waldo Emerson, who then translated Hafiz in the nineteenth century. Emerson said of Hafiz, 'Hafiz is a poet for poets,; and Goethe remarked, 'Hafiz has no peer.' Hafiz's poems were also admired by such diverse notables as Nietzsche and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wonderful character Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz; Garcia Lorca praised him, the famous composer Johannes Brahms was so touched by his verse he put several lines into compositions, and even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted the works of Hafiz in times of need. The range of Hafiz's verse in indeed stunning. He says, 'I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through--listen to this music.' In another poem Hafiz playfully sings, 'Look at the smile on the earth's lips this morning, she laid again with me last night.

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.

I commenced a deliberate system of time-killing, which united some profit with a cheering up of the heavy hours. As soon as I came on deck, and took my place and regular walk, I began with repeating over to myself a string of matters which I had in my memory, in regular order. First, the multiplication table, and the tables of weights and measures; then the states of the union; with their capitals; the countries of England, with their shire towns; the kings of England in their order; and a large part of the peerage, which I committed from an almanac that we had on board; and then the Kanaka numerals. This carried me through my facts, and, being repeated deliberately, with long intervals, often eked out the two first bells. Then came the ten commandments; the thirty-ninth chapter of Job, and a few passages from Scripture. The next in the order, that I never varied from, came Cowper’s Castaway, which was a great favorite with me; the solemn measure and gloomy character of which, as well as the incident that it was founded upon, made it well suited to a lonely watch at sea. Then his lines to Mary, his address to the jackdaw, and a short extract from Table Talk; (I abounded in Cowper, for I happened to have a volume of his poems in my chest;) “Ille et nefasto” from Horace, and Goethe’s Erl King. After I had got through these, I allowed myself a more general range among everything that I could remember, both in prose and verse.

Goethe refused to view color as a static quantity, to be measured in a spectrometer and pinned down like a butterfly to cardboard. He argued that color is a matter of perception. “With light poise and counterpoise, Nature oscillates within her prescribed limits,” he wrote, “yet thus arise all the varieties and conditions of the phenomena which are presented to us in space and time.” The touchstone of Newton’s theory was his famous experiment with a prism. A prism breaks a beam of white light into a rainbow of colors, spread across the whole visible spectrum, and Newton realized that those pure colors must be the elementary components that add to produce white. Further, with a leap of insight, he proposed that the colors corresponded to frequencies. He imagined that some vibrating bodies—corpuscles was the antique word—must be producing colors in proportion to the speed of the vibrations. Considering how little evidence supported this notion, it was as unjustifiable as it was brilliant. What is red? To a physicist, it is light radiating in waves between 620 to 800 billionths of a meter long. Newton’s optics proved themselves a thousand times over, while Goethe’s treatise on color faded into merciful obscurity.