Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That which is great from the standpoint of culture was always unpolitical, even anti-political.

Goethe's heart opened at the coming of Napoleon.

It closed at the thought of the wars of liberation.

At the very moment when Germany arose as a great power in the world of politics, France won new importance as a force in the world of culture.

In things that really matter, and these, after all, constitute culture.

The Germans are no longer worth considering.

I ask you, can you show me one single man of brains who could be mentioned in the same breath with other European thinkers, like your Goethe, your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine, and your Schopenhauer? The fact that there is no longer a single German philosopher worth mentioning is an increasing wonder.

Section 5 Everything that matters has been lost sight of by the whole of the higher educational system of Germany.

Alas, how are the mighty fallen? The potentate who was more terrible than an army with manners is now the sport of children and a common figure in melodrama.

Even the genius of Milton, Goethe, and Byron has not been able to save him from this miserable fate.

When this sobriquet of Old Nick first came into use is unknown.

Macaulay in his essay on Machiavelli says that out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave and out of his Christian name a synonym for the devil.

In Milton's great epic, Satan is really the central figure, and he is always splendid and heroic.

Shelley, in fact, complained in his preface to Prometheus Unbound that the character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure.

Goethe's Mephistopheles is less dignified than Milton's Satan, but he is full of energy and intellect, and if Faust eventually escapes from his clutches, it is only by a miracle.

At any rate, Mephistopheles is not an object of derision.

For willy-nilly the new spirit has hold of our consciences as well.

This spirit is amiable as well as disquieting, liberating as well as barbaric, and a philosopher in our day, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat what Goethe said of his successive love affairs, that it is sweet to see the moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.

Meantime our bodies in this generation are generally safe, and often comfortable, and for those who can suspend their irrational labors long enough to look about them, the spectacle of the world, if not particularly beautiful or touching, presents a rapid and crowded drama, and, what here concerns me most, one unusually intelligible.

The nations, parties, and movements that divide the scene have a known history.

It is distinct and perfect.

For this reason there is none of it today.

There is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather largeness of mind, which consists in being a synthesis of humanity in its current phases, even if without prophetic emphasis or direction, the breadth of a Goethe rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi.

But such largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial, comprehensive, Olympian.

As all poets are the same to the crowd, all poets are great poets, more or less readable, more or less comprehensible.

Some people are so clever that they read Goethe and Browning and Dante, at least so people say.

One has to be clever to understand the incomprehensibles.

Anybody can understand Shakespeare.

They teach it in all the schools.

They teach Goethe too, but only clever people care for him and keep up with him afterwards.

Nobody ever met a poet in the flesh.

There are not grades of poets, but those we understand we like.

But with a member of a nonconforming or self-made religious community, how different.

The sectary's eigene große Erfindungen, as Goethe called them, the precious discoveries of himself and his friends for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable in peculiar forms of their own, cannot but, as he has voluntarily chosen them and is personally responsible for them, fill his whole mind.

He's zealous to do battle for them and affirm them, for in affirming them, he affirms himself, and that is what we all like.

Other sides of his being are thus neglected because the religious side, always tending in every serious man to predominance over our other spiritual sides, is in him made quite absorbing and tyrannous by the condition of self-assertion and challenge which he has chosen for himself.

The last word for infirm humanity will always be that.

For this word, reiterated with a power now sublime, now affecting, but always admirable, our race will, as long as the world lasts, return to Hebrewism.

And the Bible, which preaches this word, will forever remain, as Goethe called it, not only a national book, but the book of the nations.

Again and again, after what seemed breaches and separations, the prophetic promise to Jerusalem will still be true.

And I don't know what I'd do without them.

I believe it was Goethe who wrote, We think we push, but we are pushed.

Is it possible that we go through life with a firm conviction that we are doing what we choose to do and when and where we choose to do it and with whom? That conviction is quite mistaken.

Hidden forces, quite unknown to us, are deciding for us what we will do, when and where we will do it, and with whom.

I'll be back shortly.

We could paraphrase the lines by Goethe by saying, we do not lead our lives, our lives lead

us.

And I think we would not be too far from the truth.

When she was a young girl she had learned by heart portions of Schiller's plays, and could have recited to you, had you suffered it, the whole of Hermann und Dorothea.

Goethe's domestically didactic idyll embodied all the virtues as well as all the emotions which were permissible to the German girl of the mid-century.

When the Frau Professorin was formally betrothed, on that well-remembered and never-to-be-forgotten night when she wore a wreath of real myrtle on her smooth blonde hair, together with a comfortable gown of brown lindsay woolsey, and sat, with her plump hand clasped by her betrothed, on the state sofa in the drawing-room at home, where the stove had been lighted expressly for the occasion, and wax candles were actually placed on the piano, on that never-to-be-forgotten and dearly cherished evening, her father had presented her with a framed line engraving of the famous pair of German lovers.

And the English professor's daughter might see them now, for they hung on one side of the tall white porcelain stove in the best drawing-room upstairs.

D'Iberville and Cameron of Lochiel.

Give me, oh, give me back the days When I, I too, was young, And felt, as they now feel, each coming hour New consciousness of power; The fields, the grove, the air was haunted, And all that Age has disenchanted Give me, oh, give Youth's passions unconfined, The rush of joy that felt almost like pain! Goethe.

Archibald Cameron of Lochiel, son of a Highland chief who had wedded a daughter of France, was but four years old when he lost his mother.

Brought up by his father, who was, in the language of the Scriptures, a valiant hunter in the sight of God, ever since ten years old he had followed him in the chase of the roebuck and other wild beasts, scaling the highest mountains, swimming the icy torrents, making his couch on the wet sod with no covering but his plaid, no roof but the vault of heaven.

First off is me, Emma, and mine is, "Boldness has a genius and magic to it.

Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it now." This quote came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and although the wording may be slightly paraphrased by me, it's one I've carried around with me since I was about 19.

And Charlotte said there's something very Emma about that idea of simply beginning, not waiting until everything is perfectly lined up or you feel completely ready, but having the boldness to take the first step and see where it leads.

If you listen to our podcast, it's a belief of Emma's that you'll notice popping up quite regularly.