Novelists From Germany

"I call on Fate to give me back my soul."

"What is the wisdom of a book compared with the wisdom of an angel?"

"What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go."

"Now we were standing close to the summit's rim, gazing out into the endless East."

"Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste."

"The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling."

"You seek life, and a godly fire Gushes and gleams for you out of the earth, As, with shuddering long, you Hurl yourself down to the flames of the Etna. So by a queen's wanton whim Pearls were dissolved in wine- heed her not! What folly, poet, to cast your riches Into that bright and bubbling cup! Yet still are you holy to me, as the might of the earth That bore you away, audaciously perishing! And I would follow the hero into the depths Did love not hold me."

"Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth, and one way."

"Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst // das Rettende auch. - Patmos, 1803, Vers 3f. in: Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin, Druck und Verlag von Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1873, S. 133"

"Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen, ist alles. - Fragment von Hyperion, aus: Neue Thalia, Vierter Band, Hrsg. Friedrich Schiller, Georg Joachim Göschen, Leipzig 1793, S. 220"

"The one poet who both grew out of but gave form to many of the thoughts and philosophies of these groups was Friedrich Hölderlin and though his disillusionment with the French revolution was great, the poems he wrote in response to it seek to bring a the sense of revolutionary elan and hope which it promised into his oeuvre. He did this by returning to the classical tradition and a reworking of ancient Greece which, instead of the usual promotion of a static understanding of the way history works, he emphasised the old Heraclitean adage that everything is in flux. Hope sprung eternal because hope emerged out of changed circumstances and out of the fundamental human desire to make things better, no matter how that desire may become diverted and deformed by the contingencies of the every day. His rediscovery of Dionysian desire is clear in his work."

"That's how it always was:/growing among the columns of poetry./Big brother, it was no pleasure, no."

"Happiness is … the grace of being permitted to unfold … all the spiritual powers planted within us."

"Zwischen zu früh und zu spät, liegt immer nur ein Augenblick."

"Magnify the divine mystery and the holiness of mankind."

"For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation is possible."

"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."

"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."

"The first and last thing demanded of genius is love of truth."

"Welche Regierung die beste sei? Diejenige, die uns lehrt, uns selbst zu regieren."

"Der Irrthum verhält sich gegen das Wahre wie der Schlaf gegen das Wachen. Ich habe bemerkt, daß man aus dem Irren sich wie erquickt wieder zu dem Wahren hinwende."

"Die Wahrheit widerspricht unserer Natur, der Irrthum nicht, und zwar aus einem sehr einfachen Grunde: die Wahrheit fordert, daß wir uns für beschränkt erkennen follen, der Irrthum schmeichelt uns. wir seien auf ein- oder die andere Weise unbegränzt."

"Unter allen Völkerschaften haben die Griechen den Traum des Lebens am schönsten geträumt."