Goethe Quotes - page 2
Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin. Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself.
Mary McCarthy
During the renaissances in thinking led by Shakespeare and Goethe, the first new development in memory techniques for 1,700 years appeared: the Major System. This was the first system that enabled the user to transfer easily and instantaneously from numbers to letters, thus creating the opportunity for a system that could stretch from zero to an infinite number, and which allowed the user to translate any word into its own special number, and any number into its own special letter. This multiplied the opportunity for developing memory techniques 100-fold.
Tony Buzan
"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.
Albert Camus
The rediscovery of Spinoza by the Germans contributed to the shaping of the cultural destinies of the German people for almost two hundred years. Just as at the time of the Reformation no other spiritual force was as potent in German life as the Bible, so during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no other intellectual force so dominated German life as Spinozism. Spinoza became the magnet to German steel. Except for Immanuel Kant and Herbart, Spinoza attracted every great intellectual figure in Germany during the last two centuries, from the greatest, Goethe, to the purest, Lessing.
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated Jew, made the Jewish cultural position in the West not only tenable, but impregnable. But the same Baruch Spinoza was actually responsible for the cultural anti-Semitism of modern Europe. He shaped the strong anti-Jewish attitude of his greatest admirers, followers, and adepts Herder, Goethe, Hegel, and Fichte. They were outspoken Jew-haters. They admired Spinoza, but with their master hated his race and its world-picture.
Baruch Spinoza
When I speak of Plato, Pascal, Spinoza and Goethe, I know that their blood flows in mine-I am proud, when I tell the truth about them-the family is good enough not to have to poeticize or to conceal; and thus I stand to everything that has been, I am proud of the humanity, and especially proud of unconditional truthfulness.
Baruch Spinoza
Goethe as an old man: he was so very punctual. At that time he also wrote many things that were very punctual. The rounded thing is boring. Turn it as you may, it remains round and pretty.
I love the edges, the sharp lines, and fractures.
I show to him a picture of Dostoevsky. How ruptured, furrowed, tormented!
He looks like Michelangelo; the face of an endurer and a prophet.
Joseph Goebbels
Tragedy springs from outrage; it protests at the conditions of life. It carries in it the possibilities of disorder, for all tragic poets have something of the rebelliousness of Antigone. Goethe, on the contrary, loathed disorder. He once said that he preferred injustice, signifying by that cruel assertion not his support for reactionary political ideals, but his conviction that injustice is temporary and reparable whereas disorder destroys the very possibilities of human progress. Again, this is an anti-tragic view; in tragedy it is the individual instance of injustice that infirms the general pretence of order. One Hamlet is enough to convict a state of rottenness.
George Steiner
I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated. ... Goethe said, "Talent is developed in privacy," you know? And it's really true. ... Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever.
Marilyn Monroe
In politics, he has always been a republican with advanced Socialist sympathies, and internationalist at heart, and, as they said in the eighteenth century, a "citizen of the world." He has always fought social injustice. In art, he loves, above all, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Goethe... Rembrandt is the painter dearest to him. But his chosen country is Italy.
Romain Rolland
[I]f knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing "received" in it. [...]
It is the mark of "absolute activity" (which Goethe said "makes one bankrupt, in the end"); the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive; a stoniness of heart, that will not brook any resistance - as expressed once, most radically, in the following terrifying statement: "Every action makes sense, even criminal acts ... all passivity is senseless."
Josef Pieper
Nietzsche ... argues that all that passes in the life of a society is ephemeral and banausic except for the presence of great personalities, of men like Goethe ... who seem to forge their own destinies, who seem to move unhampered by those burdens of existence which keep most men from rising above the vicissitudes of their daily toil.
John Carroll
I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented..
Hugo Ball
Moreover I want to tell Dr. Süßheim -- who wants to portray every anti-Semite as a psychopath -- about his racial fellow Dr. Otto Weininger, who as an honest Jew wrote down his thoughts in the book "Sex and Character":
"Jewry seems to be somewhat anthropologically related to the Negroes and the Mongolians. To the Negro points the readily curling hair, to an admixture of Mongolian blood points the very Chinese or Malayan formed skull, that one finds so often among Jews, which matches the usually yellowish complexion ... The fact that excellent men have almost always been anti-Semites (Tacitus, Pascal, Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Jean Paul, Schopenhauer, Grillparzer, Richard Wagner) can be explained in the following way: they, who have so much more in their own nature than other men, can also better understand Jewry."
Julius Streicher
At home these men's works [ Kant, Schiller, Goethe] were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa's study, and Törless knew this bookcase was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor. It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about.
Robert Musil
An example of this way of thinking is an exchange that took place when someone told Goethe that he admired him for his genius, towering over German intellectual life like a gigantic mountain, to which Goethe replied that "great mountains are found only in mountainous landscapes." The traditional history of art is concerned exclusively which such mountain peaks, and often, as Goethe critically pointed out, they are not even seen in relation to each other.
Asger Jorn
On September 20, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar on a military expedition to Paris) saw the finest army of Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militiamen, and said to his disconcerted friends: "In this place and on this day, a new epoch in the history of the world is beginning, and we shall be able to say that we have been present at its origin." Since that time historic days have been numerous, and one of the tasks of governments (especially in Italy, Germany, and Russia) has been to fabricate them or to simulate them with an abundance of preconditioning propaganda followed by relentless publicity.
Jorge Luis Borges
Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me, Terence]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].
Karl Marx
I am the one to whom you wrote in care of the Belgian Academy... Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich's surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.
Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone - and necessarily so - and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.
I shake your hand in heartfelt comradeship, E.
Albert Einstein
