Travel Writers

"How melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspirits a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories "Are shadows, not substantial things." Truly said the sayer, "disappointment is the salt of life" a salutary bitter which strengthens the mind for fresh exertion, and gives a double value to the prize."

"Presently our fire being exhausted, and the enemy pressing on with spear and javelin, the position became untenable; the tent was nearly battered down by clubs, and had we been entangled in its folds, we should have been killed without the power of resistance. I gave the word for a rush, and sallied out with my sabre, closely followed by Lieut. Herne, with Lieut. Speke in the rear. The former was allowed to pass through the enemy with no severer injury than a few hard blows with a war club. The latter was thrown down by a stone hurled at his chest and taken prisoner, a circumstance which we did not learn till afterwards. On leaving the tent I thought that I perceived the figure of the late Lieut. Stroyan lying upon the ground close to the camels. I was surrounded at the time by about a dozen of the enemy, whose clubs rattled upon me without mercy, and the strokes of my sabre were rendered uncertain by the energetic pushes of an attendant who thus hoped to save me. The blade was raised to cut him down: he cried out in dismay, and at that moment a Somali stepped forward, threw his spear so as to pierce my face, and retired before he could be punished. I then fell back for assistance, and the enemy feared pursuing us into the darkness. Many of our Somalis and servants were lurking about 100 yards from the fray, but nothing would persuade them to advance. The loss of blood causing me to feel faint, I was obliged to lie down, and, as dawn approached, the craft from Aynterad was seen apparently making sail out of the harbour."

"I think many would enjoy and savor the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen much better as adults. I recommend the miraculous translations by Tiina Nunnally."

"At rejse er at leve."

""But he has nothing on at all," said a little child at last. "Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child," said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. "But he has nothing on at all," cried at last the whole people. That made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself, "Now I must bear up to the end." And the chamberlains walked with still greater dignity, as if they carried the train which did not exist."

"When he saw Tiny, he was delighted, and thought her the prettiest little maiden he had ever seen. He took the gold crown from his head, and placed it on hers, and asked her name, and if she would be his wife, and queen over all the flowers. This certainly was a very different sort of husband to the son of a toad, or the mole, with my black velvet and fur; so she said, "Yes," to the handsome prince. Then all the flowers opened, and out of each came a little lady or a tiny lord, all so pretty it was quite a pleasure to look at them. Each of them brought Tiny a present; but the best gift was a pair of beautiful wings, which had belonged to a large white fly and they fastened them to Tiny's shoulders, so that she might fly from flower to flower."

"I have now learnt to despise you," he said. "You refused an honest prince; you did not appreciate the rose and the nightingale; but you did not mind kissing a swineherd for his toys; you have no one but yourself to blame!"

"Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken."

"He felt himself melting away, but he still remained firm with his gun on his shoulder. Suddenly the door of the room flew open and the draught of air caught up the little dancer, she fluttered like a sylph right into the stove by the side of the tin soldier, and was instantly in flames and was gone. The tin soldier melted down into a lump, and the next morning, when the maid servant took the ashes out of the stove, she found him in the shape of a little tin heart. But of the little dancer nothing remained but the tinsel rose, which was burnt black as a cinder."

"I can give her no greater power than she has already," said the woman; "don't you see how strong that is? How men and animals are obliged to serve her, and how well she has got through the world, barefooted as she is. She cannot receive any power from me greater than she now has, which consists in her own purity and innocence of heart. If she cannot herself obtain access to the Snow Queen, and remove the glass fragments from little Kay, we can do nothing to help her."

"I have gone through the most terrible affair that could possibly happen; only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I suppose such a poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has become a real man, and that I am his shadow." "How very terrible,” cried the princess; "is he locked up?" "Oh yes, certainly; for I fear he will never recover." "Poor shadow!" said the princess; "it is very unfortunate for him; it would really be a good deed to free him from his frail existence; and, indeed, when I think how often people take the part of the lower class against the higher, in these days, it would be policy to put him out of the way quietly."

"Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all."

"Every time a good child dies, an angel of God comes down to earth. He takes the child in his arms, spreads out his great white wings, and flies with it all over the places the child loved on earth. The angel plucks a large handful of flowers, and they carry it with them up to God, where the flowers bloom more brightly than they ever did on earth."

"She again rubbed a match on the wall, and the light shone round her; in the brightness stood her old grandmother, clear and shining, yet mild and loving in her appearance. "Grandmother," cried the little one, "O take me with you; I know you will go away when the match burns out; you will vanish like the warm stove, the roast goose, and the large, glorious Christmas-tree." And she made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God."

"His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck's nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan's egg."

"Death continued to stare at the emperor with his cold, hollow eyes, and the room was fearfully still. Suddenly there came through the open window the sound of sweet music. Outside, on the bough of a tree, sat the living nightingale. She had heard of the emperor's illness, and was therefore come to sing to him of hope and trust. And as she sung, the shadows grew paler and paler; the blood in the emperor's veins flowed more rapidly, and gave life to his weak limbs; and even Death himself listened, and said, "Go on, little nightingale, go on.""

"We sometimes live to three hundred years, but when we cease to exist here we only become the foam on the surface of the water, and we have not even a grave down here of those we love. We have not immortal souls,because Estelle is a star and we shall never live again; but, like the green sea-weed, when once it has been cut off, we can never flourish more. Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see."

"Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it: many church steeples, piled one upon another, would not reach from the ground beneath to the surface of the water above. There dwell the Sea King and his subjects."

"They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate."

"Beloved, don't fret that you gave yourself so quickly! Believe me, I don't think badly or wrongly of you. The arrows of Love are various: some scratch us, And our hearts suffer for years from their slow poison. But others strong-feathered with freshly sharpened points Pierce to the marrow, and quickly inflame the blood. In the heroic ages, when gods and goddesses loved, Desire followed a look, and joy followed desire."

"About the end of the eighteenth century fruitful suggestions and even clear presentations of this or that part of a large evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from the most divergent quarters. Especially remarkable were those which came from Erasmus Darwin in England, from Maupertuis in France, from Oken in Switzerland, and from Herder, and, most brilliantly of all, from Goethe in Germany."

"Goethe, lover of nature as he was, ruled mathematics out of place in natural history."

"Goethe wondered at what point our instruments might be creating what we think we see out there in the world. ...his question is still a good one. Every science of observation must take care not to get lost among its own artifacts."

"Goethe is the idol of the German literary public. The critics of the new school assert that since the existence of letters there have been only four of those called geniuses, on whom Nature and Art seem to have showered down all their gifts to form that perfection of intellect—a Poet. Virgil, Milton, Wieland, Klopstock, Ariosto, Ossian, Tasso, &c. &c., are singers of various and great excellence, but the sacred poetic fire has been possessed in its perfection only by Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Nay, some of this new school have even asserted that the three great "tendencies" of the are the , the and ".""

"Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother."

"In the middle of the war there was Heine, there was Goethe, there was Schiller. I did posters for the German club, in the middle of the war. When I think back to how happy I was, studying German and flunking algebra, and I think what was going on for other Jewish teenagers on the other side of the world, I'm so puzzled by those dates."

"To have travelled over the whole circumference of the modern soul, and to have sat in all its corners — my ambition, my torment, and my happiness. Veritably to have overcome pessimism, and, as the result thereof, to have acquired the eyes of a Goethe—full of love and goodwill."

"All Goethe's work, whether poetry or prose, his plays, his novels, his letters, his conversations, are richly bestrewn with the luminous sentences of a keen-eyed, steadfast, patient, indefatigable watcher of human life."

"Of Goethe it may be said that he created to a large extent the language and style of that which is best in the modern literature of his country. No such supreme influence belonging to a single individual can probably be found in any other German, French, or English writer in our century..."

"The rule which he [Carlyle] adopts is that laid down by Goethe,—“Do the duty which lies nearest thee.”"

"Goethe and Romain Rolland paint psychological landscapes, depicting both characters and spiritual conditions, but the Japanese-Flaubertian analytical tanka is a form alien to them."

"But even the distant reader must allow that Clifford's mental personality belonged to the highest possible type to say no more. The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal. And if in these modern days we are to look for any prophet or saviour who shall influence our feelings towards the universe as the founders and renewers of past religions have influenced the minds of our fathers, that prophet, if he ever come, must, like Clifford, be no mere sentimental worshipper of science, but an expert in her ways. And he must have what Clifford had in so extraordinary a degree—that lavishly generous confidence in the worthiness of average human nature to be told all truth, the lack of which in Goethe made him an inspiration to the few but a cold riddle to the many."

"I discovered such a treasure house of human nature in a conversation I had with Goethe. It was the most enjoyable moment in my life."

"Goethe said: “You close your eyes and you dip your hand into your society and you bring up a little bit of the truth.” And that is the material of your writing."

"Whereas Newton had maintained that colours already exist blended together in sunlight, Goethe insisted that they arise from the conjunction of polar opposites—just look, he said, at the coloured fringes you see against a sharp black/white edge. ...Many Romantic experimenters (including Samuel Coleridge, an important conduit for Naturphilosophie into Britain) welcomed Goethe's emphasis on polarity, which resonated with their own investigations into magnetic, electrical, and chemical activity—north and south, positive and negative, attractive and repulsive. Just as Goethe used his own eye as a recording instrument, they made their own bodies part of electric circuits."

"Everywhere he brings us into the presence of living, generous humanity—mixed and erring, and self-deluding, but saved from utter corruption by the salt of some noble impulse, some disinterested effort, some beam of good nature, even though grotesque or homely. And his mode of treatment seems to us precisely that which is really moral in its influence. It is without exaggeration; he is in no haste to alarm readers into virtue by melodramatic consequences; he quietly follows the stream of fact and of life; and waits patiently for the moral processes of nature as we all do for her material processes. The large tolerance of Goethe, which is markedly exhibited in Wilhelm Meister, is precisely that to which we point as the element of moral superiority."

"Germanic philosophical idealism is also reflected in the work of Johann Goethe, whom Hayek often read as a young man. [...] What Goethe apparently meant is that mind must first have a way of interpreting experience; next, experience is interpreted by mind. Thus, “all that is factual is already theory,” because the way that facts (experience) are interpreted is mentally constructed. There are no atomistic facts in this perspective, because all experience is interpreted."

"And knowest thou no Prophet, even in the vesture, environment, and dialect of this age? None to whom the Godlike had revealed itself, through all meanest and highest forms of the Common; and by him been again prophetically revealed: in whose inspired melody, even in these rag-gathering and rag-burning days, Man's Life again begins, were it but afar off, to be divine? Knowest thou none such? I know him, and name him—Goethe."

"Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe."

"[I]f I have been delivered from darkness into any measure of light, if I know aught of myself and my duties and destination, it is to the study of your writings more than to any other circumstance that I owe this; it is you more than any other man that I should always thank and reverence with the feeling of a Disciple to his Master, nay of a Son to his Spiritual Father."

"He admired nature's moving order and conceived of form as a pattern of relationships within an organized whole—a conception that is at the forefront of contemporary systems thinking. "Each creature," wrote Goethe, "is but a patterned gradation of one great harmonious whole."

"I have been reading a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea, and this priggishness is the finest of its kin that I can call to mind. Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German."

"They abandon themselves credulously to every fanatic scoundrel who speaks to their baser qualities, confirms them in their vices, teaches them nationality means barbarism and isolation."

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

"He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as Divine Law, and not as a book of a human being made for education or entertainment."

"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals."

"Reden ist uns ein Bedürfnis, Zuhören ist eine Kunst."

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished."

"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live."

"Encourage the beautiful, the useful will take care of itself."