/staff avatar Quotation added by staff

Why not add this quote to your bookmarks?


  ...He consciously takes the measure of his own powers, and forms clear judgments on the literary and artistic tastes of the time. The poems which he had written in Leipzig now seemed to him "trifling, cold, dry, and superficial," and, as in Leipzig he had made a holocaust of his boyish poems, so he made a second holocaust of those produced in Leipzig. In a long letter addressed (February 13th, 1769) to Friederike Oeser he thus expounds the artistic ideals at which he had then arrived: A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher.   and he who has laboriously thumbed the pages of many books regards with contempt the simple, easy book of nature; and yet nothing is true except what is simple--certainly a sorry recommendation for true wisdom. Let him who goes the way of simplicity go it in quiet. Modesty and circumspection are the essential characteristics of him who would tread this path, and every step will bring its reward. I have to thank your dear father for these conceptions; he it was who prepared my mind to...   Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Excerpt from The Youth of Goethe · This quote is about scholars and scholarship · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.


A bit about Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von ...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 - 22 March 1832), commonly known as "Goethe", was a German poet, novelist, philosopher, and scientist who is considered one of the giants of the literary world. In addition, aside from being lawyer and known also as a dramatist, humanist, theorist, and painter, he is also one of few individuals considered to have been a polymath. For ten years, he was chief minister of state for the duchy of Weimar. In 1782 he was ennobled as 'von Goethe'. In his 1809 masterpiece Elective Affinities, he became one of the first to speculate on the nature of interpersonal chemistry. Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; this movement coincides with Enlightenment, Sentimentality ("Empfindsamkeit"), Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. The author of Faust and Theory of Colours, he influenced Darwin with his focus on plant morphology. Goethe's influence spread across Europe, and for the next century his works were a primary source of inspiration in music, drama, poetry, and philosophy. He is widely considered to be one of the most important thinkers in Western culture.

These people bookmarked this quote:

  • Nobody has bookmarked this quote yet.

More on the author

This quote around the web

Loading...

 

Search Quotations Book