Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann WolfgangGoethetə/; German: ; 28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer and statesman. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him exist...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 August 1749
CountryGermany
If you are to accomplish all that one demands of you, you must overestimate your own worth.
National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.
It is better for you to suffer an injustice than for the world to be without law. Therefore, let everyone submit to the law.
What is predestination? Answer: God is more powerful and wiser than we are, therefore he deals with us according to his pleasure.
Association with women is the basis of good manners.
The eternal feminine draws us up.
Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination.
Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of beingcreated so as to understand them to some degree.
What matters in art is not thinking but making.
Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.
To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.
There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.
Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united.
A stated truth loses its grace, but a repeated error appears insipid and ridiculous.