Maxims and Reflections
1833
Maxims and Reflections
1833
Translated by T. Bailey (Thomas Bailey) Saunders
Here is a thinker alone with his own mind, distilling decades of living, writing, and observing into sentences that cut like glass. Goethe, who poetry and mining engineering had in common, who directed plays while conducting anatomical research, who advised a duke on irrigation and still produced masterpieces in every literary form, turns his attention inward. These 1,413 maxims and reflections move from the nature of beauty to the mechanics of administration, from what makes a character to what makes a poem, from the behavior of light to the behavior of lovers. They are not system philosophy but occasion thinking: responses to books, chance encounters, the daily business of being alive in a complicated world. Here you find the man behind Faust, the intelligence behind the theory of colors, the bureaucrat who understood that all systems fail without generosity. A book to return to across a lifetime, each aphorism revealing new facets as you change.
Editions
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“Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Fools and wise-folk are alike harmless. It is the half-wise, and the half-foolish, who are the most dangerous.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“There are people who make no mistakes because they never wish to do anything worth doing.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Reading ought to mean understanding; writing ought to mean knowing something; believing ought to mean comprehending; when you desire a thing, you will have to take it; when you demand it, you will not get it; and when you are experienced, you ought to be useful to others.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“A rainbow which lasts for a quarter of an hour is looked at no longer.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Anyone that doesn't know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.””
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
![Faust [part 1]. Translated into English in the Original Metres](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3b2n8gj62qnwr.cloudfront.net%2FCOVERS%2Fgutenberg_covers75k%2Febook-14591.png&w=3840&q=75)
