Wit and Wisdom / JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The best that history has to give us is the enthusiasm which it arouses.

The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the various nations appear one after the other.

The writing of history is a method of getting rid of the past.

No nation acquires the power of judgment unless it can pass judgment upon itself. But to this great privilege it can only attain at a very late stage.

Certain books seem to have been written, not in order to afford us any instruction, but merely for the purpose of letting us know that their authors knew something.

I see no error made which I might not have committed myself.

There is something magical in rhythm; it even makes us believe that the sublime lies within our reach.

We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.

We are never so far removed from our desires as when we imagine that we possess that which we desire.

Let no man imagine that people have waited for him as for the Savior.

Our passions are true phoenixes. As soon as the old one is consumed, the new one rises forth from its ashes.

The secret places in the path of life may not and cannot be revealed; there are stumbling blocks over which every wanderer must fall. But the poet points to where they are.

The dignity of art appears to the greatest advantage perhaps in music, because that art contains no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it elevates and ennobles everything which it expresses.

To behold difficult objects lightly handled gives us the impression of the impossible.

The ridiculous arises from a moral contrast which is innocently placed before the senses.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY W.B. RONNFELDT

From “Great Writings of Goethe,” edited by Stephen Spender (New American Library: 282 pp., out of print)