"Goethe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac knows that he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when he wrote a hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in composing a treatise on divorce. No more again did Goethe know how exquisitely humorous he was when he wrote, in his Wilhelm Meister, that a beautiful tear glistened in Theresa's right eye, and then went on to explain that it glistened in her right eye and not ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... words, German military and political power is to be crushed in order to set free the German genius for science, literature, and art. It is interesting to contrast with such views as these the following words of Goethe, uttered ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force; But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power? 2103 MATTHEW ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... of my hour. The guards would then sit down near me, and begin to converse with each other. One of them, a Bohemian, named Kral, had, though very poor, received some sort of an education, which he had himself improved by reflection. He was fond of reading, had studied Klopstock, Wieland, Goethe, Schiller, and many other distinguished German writers. He knew a good deal by memory, and repeated many passages with feeling and correctness. The other guard was a Pole, by name Kubitzky, wholly untaught, but kind and respectful. ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... For a whole week he was busily at work; but it was a pleasure afterwards to go into his room. Before the window stood a neat table, covered with various little things; in one corner was a set of shelves for books, with busts of Schiller and Goethe; on the walls hung maps, four Grevedon heads, and guns; near the table was an elegant row of pipes with clean mouthpieces; there was a rug in the outer room; all the doors shut and locked; the windows were hung with curtains. ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... was a scientist, yet he was of a nation that had produced Goethe as well as Weismann and his heart was quick to respond to truth, shot with the rainbow ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... faultlessly dressed, and he had most tranquil manners. Well, our good friend Midas is that gentleman. He is the curator of a fine museum. He opens the door to a well-furnished club. But he is in no proper sense master of his house. The master of such a house, as Goethe said of the picture-owner, is the man to whom you can say, 'Show me the best.' Poor Midas could only show us ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... chiefly, and battled through the Conciliatore, a literary journal famous in Italian annals. They vaunted the English and Germans; they could not endure mythology; they laughed the three unities to scorn. At Paris Manzoni had imbibed the new principles, and made friends with the new masters; for Goethe and Schiller he abandoned Alfieri and Monti. "Yet if the Romantic School, by its name, its ties, its studies, its impressions, was allied to German traditions and French fashions, it was at bottom Italian in accent, aspiration, form, and motive.... Every one felt our hopes palpitating under ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... rhyming does not prevent it from belonging to the historical treatment of periods that are picturesque with many passions and interests, that go clad in jaunty regimental costumes, and require not to be idealized, but simply to be described. Goethe, in his soldier's song in "Faust," idealizes at a touch the rough work, the storming and marauding of the mediaeval Lanzknecht; set to music, it might be sung by fine dilettanti tenors in garrison, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... undoubtedly be surprised at finding only two poems of Schiller included in the collection. May I point to the length of these two poems, 270 lines? Even to Goethe I have given only 362 lines. Why did I choose these two poems? The lighter lyric verse of Schiller is not representative of the poet nor would it have enriched the Anthology with a new note. Das Lied von der Glocke ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Goethe made poems of his chagrins; Mrs. Child in this instance utilized her privations and forced economies to make a book; and a wonderfully successful book it was. She was not wrong in supposing it would meet a want. During ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... appointed Professor of Philosophy in the University of Basel. In 1874 he received a "call" to succeed the late Kuno Fischer as Professor of Philosophy in the renowned University of Jena. It is here, in the "little nest" of Goethe and Schiller, that Eucken has remained in spite of "calls" to universities situated in larger towns and carrying with them larger salaries. It is fortunate for Jena that Eucken has thus decided. He, along with his late colleague Otto Liebmann, has kept up the philosophical ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... coherent view of life, no belief, no faith to guide his vagrant footsteps; but such an opinion does him injustice. He had his own philosophy, and held to it for long years with astonishing tenacity. His attitude towards life can best be seen if he is held up against Goethe. He took the artist's view of life which Goethe was the first to state and indeed in youth had overstated with an astonishing persuasiveness: "the beautiful is more than the good," said Goethe; "for it ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... A DOUBLE IMAGE.—At the Italian exhibition in the Champ de Mars there was a statue that attracted much attention from the visitors. It represented Goethe's Marguerite standing before a mirror. This latter gave by reflection the image of Faust. The artifice was well concealed by the sculptor. In reality, it was not a double statue, but the figure of Faust was skilfully obtained by means of the folds ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... Page The Eye: its primary Idea 25 Gossiping History—De Quincey's Account of Hatfield 26 Notes upon the Names of some of the Early Inhabitants of Hellas 27 Shakspeare Readings, No. IX. 28 Goethe's Author-Remuneration 29 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... of doing all the work which he feels that he himself could do, or expressing all the emotions which he himself longs to express; a dull brain and dull senses, which cramp the eager infinity within him; as—so Goethe once said with pity—the horse's single hoof cramps the fine intelligence and generosity of his nature, and forbids him even to grasp an object, like the more stupid cat, and baser monkey. And man has a self, too, within, from which he longs too often to escape, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... l'ange des tnbres Qu' peine de ce temps il nous reste un grand nom? Que Gricault, Cuvier, Schiller, Goethe et Byron Soient endormis d'hier sous les dalles funbres, Et que nous ayons vu tant d'autres morts clbres Dans ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... submission, may be dominated, and is, by sex emotions of a certain class; but not less dominated have been the most cultured, powerful, and highly differentiated male intelligences that the race has produced. A Mill, a Shelley, a Goethe, a Schiller, a Pericles, have not been more noted for vast intellectual powers, than for the depth and intensity of their sexual emotions. And, if possible, with the human female, the relation between intensity of sexual emotion and high intellectual gifts has been yet closer. The life of ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... were met by the reception-committee. Accompanied by this committee, the party visited the ancient Roemer, within whose venerable walls for many centuries the German emperors were chosen; then the quaint and venerated mansion in which Goethe was born; then the old cathedral, wherein a score or more of German potentates were crowned; and then, in succession, the poet Boerne's birthplace, the Judengasse, the original home of the Rothschilds, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... individual scenes. This is not committing an injustice; for it is absolutely unimportant, so far as our investigation is concerned, whether and in how far Koerner had the ability to construct a tragedy, since this faculty—as Goethe's example shows us—has nothing to do with poetry in itself. There is no need for us to draw the parallel between the Prince of Homburg and Zriny; it is quite evident. One reproach, however, which might be made ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... and the non-nucleated cell? I do not. As I sat alone last night unable to sleep, my eyes ran over the backs of the books on my shelves—they were all there, all the great ones, Laplace, Spinoza, Descartes, Goethe, Spencer, Hegel, Kant, Darwin, all the wonder-workers. How masterful each had been in his time. How complacent of praise; how critical of the past! But here now they all stood gathering dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers of the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy. In that year there came to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe made love and wrote poetry. He became music-master to the English queen as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as "the English Bach." He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of London society. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... that we have produced great philosophers and poets, we have preached the gospel of humanity with impassioned zeal. America fully appreciates Goethe and Kant, looks upon them as cornerstones of elevated culture. Do you really believe that we have changed our natures, that our souls can be satisfied with military drill and servile obedience? We are soldiers because we have to be ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... its true haven; it lays down the sword; its voice calls no longer to strife, but to peace; it now inspires and uplifts, and Greek literature ends with Socrates and Plato, Rome with Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, England with Carlyle and Ruskin, America with Emerson, and Germany with Goethe. Letters indeed go on in England, in America, and in Germany, but the cycle is completed; and higher than Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin, the soul need not seek to rise. Whatever ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... wilderness to the rich stores of learning this university contained. It was at this time that he fairly began serious literary study and laid the foundation of his extensive knowledge of books. In one of his vacations he made a little tour in Germany, visiting Goethe, who made a characteristic speech about Byron's recent separation from his wife—namely, that in its circumstances and the mystery involving it it was so poetical that if Byron had invented it he could hardly have found a more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... sketches. An excellence of Shakspeare is the individuality of his characters. "They are real beings of flesh and blood," the critics tell us; "they speak like men, not like authors." How truly this applies to the persons mentioned in sacred writ! Goethe has compared the characters of Shakspeare to "watches with crystalline cases and plates, which, while they point out with perfect accuracy the course of the hours and minutes, at the same time disclose the whole combination ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... few admirable casts from the antique lit up the deeper shadows of the room, such as the immortally youthful head of the Apollo Belvedere, the wisely serene countenance of the Pallas Athene that Goethe loved, and the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... theory of colors with all their marvellous and complicated relations, was a riddle which Goethe in vain attempted to solve, nor were we physicists and physiologists more successful. I include myself in the number, for I long toiled at the task without getting any nearer my object, until I at last discovered that a wonderfully simple solution had been discovered at the beginning ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... Yet often with respect he speaks of thee. Tasso. Thou meanest with forbearance, prudent, subtle, 'Tis that annoys me, for he knows to use Language so smooth and so conditional, That seeming praise from him is actual blame. —GOETHE'S Tasso ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... propounded, at about the same period, their law of compensation or balancement of growth; or, as Goethe expressed it, "in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economise on the other side." I think this holds true to a certain extent with our domestic productions: if nourishment flows to one part or organ in excess, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... "Moonshine" seems to be attempting too much. "Winter" does better, for it has a freezing stream, a mill-wheel, and a "widow bird." These "four little poems" of opus 32 had been preceded by six fine "Idylls" based on lyrics of Goethe's. The first, a forest scene, has a distinct flavor of the woods, the second is all laziness and drowsiness, and the third is moonlight mystery. The fourth is as intense in its suppressed spring ecstasy as the radiant poem itself ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the face of the earth. And as our students learn Greek in order to read Homer and Plato and Paul and John, and Latin in order to read Virgil and Tacitus, and Italian to read Dante, and German to read Goethe, so William Law tells us that he learned Behmen's Behmenite High Dutch, and that too after he was an old man, in order that he might completely master the Aurora and its kindred books. And as our schoolboys laugh and jeer at the outlandish ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... the extreme," Kostya interrupted. "We are not talking of giants like Shakespeare or Goethe; we are talking of the hundreds of talented mediocre writers, who would be infinitely more valuable if they would let love alone, and would employ themselves in spreading knowledge and humane ideas ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... It is the men who must weep in these poems. Charizi sings of the lover whose heart succeeds in concealing its love, whose lips contrive to maintain silence on the subject, but his tears play traitor and betray his affection to all the world. Dr. Sulzbach aptly quotes parallels to this fancy from Goethe ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... absolute intellectual liberty..... It is the last in date of all literary forms, and it will end by absorbing them all .... To be perfectly frank the critic should say: 'Gentlemen, I propose to enlarge upon my own thoughts concerning Shakespeare, Racine, Pascal, Goethe, or any other writer.'" ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... should understand Spanish; but I tried him with the few words I know, and also with some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips puzzled me utterly. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated, just the least bit scared by the flood of passionate ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... in such dark times, are all theories of mere self-education; all proud attempts, like that of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, to hang self-poised in the centre of the abyss, and there organise for oneself a character by means of circumstances! Easy enough, and graceful enough does that dream look, while all ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... painted at Duesseldorf, but they are immediately carried elsewhere. We visited the studio of Schroeter—a man with humor in every line of his face, who had nothing to show us but a sketch, just prepared for the easel, of the scene in Goethe's Faust, where Mephistophiles, in Auerbach's cellar, bores the edge of the table with a gimlet, and a stream of champagne gushes out. Koehler, an eminent artist, allowed us to see a clever painting on his easel, in a state of considerable ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... again, will suffice for the opinions of Goethe, Treviranus, and Oken, none of whom can I discover as having originated any important new idea; but knowing no German, I have taken this opinion from the resume of each of these writers, given by Professor Haeckel in his ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... of our meeting had lost a little of its first, fine, carbonated sting, what Elysian hours we did spend over the correspondence of those other two friends, Goethe and Schiller! Passage after passage we would turn back to re-read and muse over. These we would discuss without any of the rancor or dogmatic insistence or one-eyed stubbornness that usually accompany the clash of mental steel on mental steel from a different ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... subconscious ideas, which, we are told by Dr. Morton Prince, furnish the perceptual elements of the dream. The other senses are sometimes represented. Often we are performing, or trying to perform, some action. But dreams are predominantly visual. Goethe has said, "I believe men only dream that they ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Chesterfield, Lord, Cleghorn, James, Editor of Blackwood's Magazine, Colburn, the publisher, "Vivian Grey"; declines "Sartor Resartus," Coleridge, John Taylor; appointed Editor to Quarterly Review; wishes to resign editorship, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; correspondence with Murray; Goethe's "Faust"; "Wallenstein"; "The Friend"; "Remorse," "Glycine," "Christabel," "Christmas Tale," "Zapolya"; opinion of Frere, Colman's Comedy, "John Bull," Colquhoun, Rt. Hon. J.C. (Lord Advocate), Colquhoun, John, "The Moor and the Loch"; correspondence with Murray; dissatisfaction ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... little of an archaeological kind with which he was unacquainted, and he was so famous a discoverer of antiquities that the superstitious Romans thought that he was in league with the devil. The landscapes of More, though highly praised by Goethe, would appeal to Raeburn little more than did the "sublime" historical designs of Hamilton. They were but dilutions, frequently flavoured with melodramatic sentiment, of the noble convention formulated by ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... the story of "Reynard" for the subject of a great poem; and the famous painter Kaulbach has recently illustrated Goethe's version with perhaps the finest series of pictures with which ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... King August are likewise splendors of a sort, if we had time for them. Dukes of Sachsen-Gotha, Dukes of Meiningen, most of the Dukes that put Sachsen to their name;—Sachsen-Weimar for one; who is Grandfather of Goethe's Friend, if not otherwise distinguished. The Lubomirskis, Czartoryskis, and others of Polish breed, shall be considered as foreign to us, and go unnoticed. Nor are high Dames wanting, as we see: vast ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... consolation for death, if anywhere, then in life, and in life not as it might be imagined beyond the grave, but as it had been and would be lived on earth, appears to be consonant with all that we know of the clear and objective temper of the race. It is the spirit which was noted long ago by Goethe as inspiring the sepulchral monuments ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... situations did Goethe say were possible? Something like thirty-two. Which seems a lot. Anyhow, granted that men are men still, that not all of them are bits, parts, machine-sections, then we have added another tragic possibility to the list: the Strike ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... still, in part at least, an admirable aid to those who know how to use it. But there are other books, such as the legacy of the great Stoics, the writings of our latter-day prophets, the essays of Arnold and Carlyle and Emerson, the wisdom of Goethe. These noble works, even if they do not wholly satisfy us, serve to set our thoughts in motion about high concerns, and give to the ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... the realm of immortal song when you gaze on the busts of Goethe and Schiller, and your patriotism is stirred afresh as you behold the monument of Francis Scott Key, author of the Star-Spangled Banner. The Muses also have their abode here on the colonnaded Music Stand or Pavilion erected by Claus Spreckles ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... a part for the whole, or a whole for the part; as, "The harbor was crowded with masts." Synecdoche is a species of metonymy, and has the same effect of giving vividness. This is apparent in a well-known quatrain from Goethe: ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... GOETHE, with a forehead Like the fabled front of Jove; In its massive lines the tokens ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... his death Schiller left his widow and children almost penniless, and almost friendless too. The duke and duchess were absent; Goethe lay ill; even Schiller's brother-in-law Wolzogen was away from home. Frau von Wolzogen was with her sister, but seems to have been equally ill-fitted to bear her share of the load that had fallen so heavily upon them. Heinrich Voss was the only friend admitted ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... too hard at first," said Louisa. "Goethe—or was it Napoleon?—said five hours a day is enough for mental labor. Couldn't you take me and the children to the woods ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... in these two poems, the form is essentially different. The resemblance with Lycidas is closer, and closer still with the poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregular ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... after poetic fame does not remain with our poet within the usual, normal limits but becomes much more a peculiar neurotic characteristic. No less a hope for instance had Heinrich von Kleist than with an unheard of creation to strike at Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe and concerning the last named he uttered this audacious sentiment, "I will rend the crown from his brow!" Since he fails to attain this goal in spite of repeated most earnest onslaughts, he rushes away to die upon the battlefield. He writes to his sister, however, "Heaven ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... pine-log that warmed her feet. These, with the Hoppners, known to Shelley and Byron, a French sculptress of royalist sympathies, Mlle. de Fauveau, much admired by Browning, and one of the grandsons of Goethe, who flits into and out of the scene, were a compensation for the repulsiveness of certain English folk at Florence who gathered together only for the frivolities, and worse than ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... passionate—could hardly have been more so had she been prostrate with contemplation in the Sistine Chapel or in one of the chambers of the Pitti Palace. The only analogy I can recall to this earnestness of interest in great works of art at a distance from them, is furnished by the great Goethe's elaborate study of plaster-casts and pencil-drawings at Weimar. I mention Margaret Fuller here because a glimpse of her state of mind—her vivacity of desire and poverty of knowledge—helps to define the situation. The situation lives for a moment in those few words of Mr. Lathrop's. The initiated ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal, disinterested, and objective line of thought." But then, again, with him "action" meant chiefly literary production. He quotes with approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between "frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after what is unknown and distant." There is, doubtless, over and above the physical consumptive ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... sang in the very key of their own times. Puritanism waited for its hour of triumph to produce its great poet, who lived unmolested when the hour of triumph passed and that of reprisals succeeded. Racine was a royal pensioner; Goethe a chamberlain and the most admired figure of his time. Of course, if you hold that these poets one and all pale their ineffectual fires before the radiant Shelley, our argument must go a few steps farther back. I have instanced them ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the German Version of Goethe, with Illustrations, by J. Wolf. Part IV. carries us on to The Trial, which is very ably rendered.—Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, by various Writers, edited by W. Smith. This Sixth Part, extending from Cinabi to Cyrrhestica, contains {370} ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... conveyed us to a more quiet street. We intended to do homage to some one else—to pay our respects to the king of literature. We desired to make a pilgrimage to the place where the greatest poet of Germany was born, and visit the dear lady his mother, Mde. Counsellor Goethe. ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... after the merry society as it drove away. "This is a good bite for the poisonous tongues of the honorable," cried the duke. "My mother in a farm-wagon, with Wieland's green overcoat on, and the reigning duke, with his Goethe, entering his capital on foot like a journeyman mechanic, after a ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... it was founded upon, making it well suited to a lonely watch at sea. Then his lines to Mary, his address to the Jackdaw, and a short extract from Table Talk (I abounded in Cowper, for I happened to have a volume of his poems in my chest); "Ille et nefasto'' from Horace, and Goethe's Erl Knig. After I had got through these, I allowed myself a more general range among everything that I could remember, both in prose and verse. In this way, with an occasional break by relieving the wheel, heaving the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... seeds of hatred which it sowed, of which there is now a harvest of blood past precedent, but also in the development of an arrogant pride which has profoundly affected to its prejudice the noble Germany of Luther, Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Humboldt, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... mit der Seele suchen!" says Goethe. The friends of Apicius who failed to heed this advice, also failed to comprehend the precepts, they were cured of their curiosity, and blamed the master for their own shortcomings. Christina, queen of ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... nature than from the genuine motives of ancient art; and a return to true Hellenism was as much a part of this reaction as the sudden preoccupation with things medieval. The medieval tendency is in Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, the Hellenic in his Iphigenie. At first this medievalism was superficial, or at least external. Adventure, romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism—that is one element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott and Goethe dealt. Beyond them were ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... forget that the case of Le Sage is not precisely that of a person who publishes, as an original, a translation from a printed work, as Wieland did with his copy of Rowe's Lady Jane Grey, and Lord Byron with his copy of the most musical lines in Goethe. The offence of Le Sage more resembles that imputed (we sincerely believe without foundation) to Raphael; namely, that after the diligent study of some ancient frescoes, he suffered them to perish, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... could say that Moltke must have been an Italian, from the old Latin root mol—indicating the sweetness of that general's disposition. We might say Bismarck was a Frenchman, since his name begins with the popular theatrical cry of "Bis!" We might say Goethe was an Englishman, because his name begins with the popular sporting cry "Go!" But the ultimate difference between us and the Prussian professor is simply that ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... readers, and analogous causes. None of these can be a VERA CAUSA; though each may have had its special influence in determining the production of some imperfect works. The main cause I take to be that indicated in Goethe's aphorism: "In this world there are so few voices and so many echoes." Books are generally more deficient in sincerity than in cleverness. Talent, as will become apparent in the course of our inquiry, holds a very subordinate position ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... about 1809, younger daughter of Charles Mignon de la Bastie and of Bettina Mignon de la Bastie—born Wallenrod. In 1829, while living with her family at Havre, with the same love, evoked by a passion for literature, which Bettina Brentano d'Arnim conceived for Goethe, she fell in love with Melchior de Canalis; she wrote frequently to the poet in secret, and he responded through the medium of Ernest de la Briere; thus there sprang up between the young girl and the secretary a mutual love which resulted ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the larger movements of the time. Nothing in Browning's boyhood tended to open his imagination to the sense of citizenship and nationality which the imperial pageants and ceremonies of Frankfurt so early kindled in the child Goethe. But within the limits imposed by this quiet home young Robert soon began to display a vigour and enterprise which tried all its resources. "He clamoured for occupation from the moment he could speak," and "something to do" meant above all some living ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... things he read, and in Joseph Fawcett, a retired minister, he found an agreeable companion. "A heartier friend or honester critic I never coped withal."[4] "The writings of Sterne, Fielding, Cervantes, Richardson, Rousseau, Godwin, Goethe, etc. were the usual subjects of our discourse, and the pleasure I had had, in reading these authors, was more than doubled."[5] How acutely sensitive he was to all impressions at this time is indicated by the effect upon ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... was remarked that when the Gods appear among men, it is seldom in recognisable shape; thus Admetus' neatherds give Apollo a draught of their goatskin whey-bottle (well if they do not give him strokes with their ox-rungs), not dreaming that he is the Sungod! This man's name is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He is Herzog Weimar's Minister, come with the small contingent of Weimar; to do insignificant unmilitary duty here; very irrecognizable to nearly all! He stands at present, with drawn bridle, on the height near Saint-Menehould, making an experiment on the 'cannon-fever;' having ridden ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... not better and more precise to say that it is to us the look and expression of the spiritual when this is peering through choicest embodiments? But we will stop with definitions. After endeavoring, by means of sentences and definitions to get a notion of the beautiful, one is tempted to say, as Goethe did when "the idea of the Divinity" was venturously mentioned to him by Eckermann, "Dear child, what know we of the idea of the Divinity? and what can our narrow ideas tell of the Highest Being? Should I, like a Turk, name it with a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparison ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... our moralities, it always submits itself to beauty. Emerson says, "Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, have an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on common principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast maintainers of the pure, ideal morality. But they worship it as the highest beauty, their love ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... attraction of the classic culture, "the humanities," as it was well called, was just this cosmopolitan largeness, that it had no prejudices and prescribed no test, but was open to all kinds of merit and every manner of man. Goethe, who belongs in good part to the Renaissance, frequently exemplifies this feeling, perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the account of his pilgrimage to the temple of Minerva at Assisi, which he lovingly describes, remarking, at the same time, that he passed with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... remark very true, though ghosts are attributed to "imagination." Whatever causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of phantasia which is consciously exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far too many ghosts to believe in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe and Shelley, who met themselves, what poet ever did "see a ghost"? One who saw Tennyson as he wandered alone at this period called him "a mysterious being, seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of intercourse with the spirit world ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... realization. To set one's face in the direction of the mountain and then simply to journey on, whether rapidly or more slowly, will bring him to it. But unless one set his face in the right direction and make the start, he will not reach it. It was Goethe who said: ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... what the so-called Pagan Goethe, intent on self-culture as the first if not the final duty of man, makes Serlo in his "Meister" lay down as a rule which one should observe daily. "One," he says, "ought every day to hear a little song, ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... shadow. Below the picture Rembrandt wrote his name and the date 1633, with two Latin words meaning that he designed and etched the plate himself. This would seem to show that he was well pleased with his work, and it is interesting to learn that the great German poet, Goethe, ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... an unconquerable opaqueness. And the alchemy that should have transmuted these to gold, and educed from the one light and from the other majesty, was wanting. A trace of Behmen here, a reading of Cousin's lectures there, some Schiller and more Goethe, some pietism encouraged by a love of Channing, the American Fenelon, some German ballads and a flavor of Plato,—all these helped the initiated to a curious dialect and a curious melange. And this was Transcendentalism. The great ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and keepers of mysterious dungeons. Doubtless these subterranean apartments were the meeting-places of some secret tribunals, such as the Vehmic courts, which existed in the middle ages in Westphalia. Scott and Goethe have made use of these dungeons in their works, and our students regarded them as a splendid field for the later ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... detachment. I commend a serene indifference to hubbub. I like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac, Darwin, and other sages, for having been so concentrated on this or that eternal verity in art or science or philosophy, that they paid no heed to alarums and excursions which were sweeping all other folk off their feet. It is with some shame that I ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... afternoon I potter in the garden with Goethe. He did not, I am sure, care much really about flowers and gardens, yet he said many lovely things about them that remain in one's memory just as persistently as though they had been inspired expressions of actual feelings; and the intellect must indeed have been ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... above everything a true representative of the German people, and so we ought to take note of some of the qualities of the German mind. As Goethe, their greatest poet, says, one of their strongest characteristics is that of wishing to learn and to do rather than to enjoy. The Germans love truth and they do not stop short in their imaginings when they wish to drive it home. So in German art, the ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... restless, his demands outran the quickest performance,—there united itself to the deepest reverence and devotedness, in his People, a feeling of awe, as for one whose limbs are not moved by earthly life [fanciful, considerably!]. And when Goethe, himself become an old man, finished his last Drama [Second Part of FAUST], the figure of the old King again rose on him, and stept into his Poem; and his Faust got transformed into an unresting, creating, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... especially by Archdeacon Paley, whose Natural Theology exercised a powerful influence down to recent times. The same tendency appeared in other countries, though various philosophers showed weak points in the argument, and Goethe made sport of it in a noted verse, praising the forethought of the Creator in foreordaining the cork tree to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... worthy of note that while Irving lived to unusual fullness of years, yet he never was considered an old man. We do not so much refer to his erect and vigorous frame as to the freshness of his mind. It is said that Goethe, on being asked the definition of a poet, replied: 'One who preserves to old age the feelings of youth.' Such was a leading feature in Mr. Irving's spirit, which, notwithstanding his shadowed hours, was so buoyant and cheerful. His countenance was penseroso ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... express emotion, if I may so put it, is to weaken that expression, and it would naturally be the strongest emotion that would first feel the inadequacy of the new-found speech. Now what is mankind's strongest emotion? Even in the nineteenth century Goethe could say, "'Tis fear that constitutes the god-like in man." Certainly before the Christian era the soul of mankind had its roots in fear. In our superstition we were like children beneath a great tree of which the upper part was as a vague and fascinating mystery, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... published "Alide," a romance in prose drawn from Goethe's autobiography. It may be of interest to quote the letter she received ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... completed. Johanna, the elder, had been a disappointment to her mother. Left to her own devices at an impressionable age, the girl had developed bookish tastes at the cost of her appearance: influenced by a free-thinking tutor of her brothers', she had read Huxley and Haeckel, Goethe and Schopenhauer. Her wish had been for a university career, but she was not of a self-assertive nature, and when Mrs. Cayhill, who felt her world toppling about her ears at the mention of such a thing, said: "Not while I live!" she yielded, without a further word; and the fact that such an emphatic ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... something to be glad of: it lends itself kindly to perusal, and it presents Goethe's charming poem in the metre of the original.... It is not a poem which could be profitably used in an argument for the enlargement of the sphere of woman: it teaches her subjection, indeed, from the lips of a beautiful girl, which are always ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... that in his dreams Goethe solved many weighty scientific problems and put into words many most beautiful verses. So also La Fontaine (The Fable of Pleasures) and Coleridge and Voltaire. Bernard Palissy had in a dream the inspiration for one of his most ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Music to Goethe's "Jery und Baetely,"—which, in theatrical parlance, was shockingly damned;—but then "its author had made many enemies as editor of the 'Musikalische Zeitung,'" and the singers and actors embraced this opportunity of revenge. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Florence Smollett selected the alternative route by Narni, Terni, Spoleto, Foligno, Perugia, and Arezzo, and, by his own account, no traveller ever suffered quite so much as he did from "dirt," "vermin," "poison," and imposture. At Foligno, where Goethe also, in his travels a score of years or so later, had an amusing adventure, Smollett was put into a room recently occupied by a wild beast (bestia), but the bestia turned out on investigation to be no more or no less than an "English heretic." The food was so filthy that it ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... there many a promontory excites the just admiration of the visitor by its growth of olives, orange and lemon trees, and odoriferous shrubs. Who that has ever sojourned in this province can wonder that Goethe's Mignon should have ardently desired a return to these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... is from one of the subtilest and most universal thinkers now living—Thomas Carlyle—chiefly known to the public as a German scholar and the friend of Goethe, but deeply respected by other leading intellects of the day, as a man who sees into the utmost recognized possibilities of knowledge. See what he thinks of war, and of the possibility of putting an end to it. We forget whether we got the extract from ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... the star That shines afar, Without haste And without rest, Let each man wheel, with steady sway, Round the task that rules the day, And do his best." —GOETHE. ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... expressions are figurative and metaphorical; he is quick to seize analogies; and when he cannot explain he is ever ready to invent. This is shown in his inappeasable love of story telling. As a raconteur he is untiring. He has, in the highest degree, Goethe's Lust zu fabuliren. In no Oriental city does the teller of strange tales find a more willing audience than in the Indian wigwam. The folk lore of every tribe which has been properly investigated has ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... FRIENDS is based on a version of the Faust legend which identifies the inventor of printing with Dr. Faust, and contains allusions to some of the incidents of Goethe's double poem: the magical drinking bout of the first part, and the appearance of the Grecian Helen in the second; but whereas the popular tradition makes Fust's great discovery the fruit of his alliance with the powers of Evil, Mr. Browning represents it as ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... military history. The German governess told Lanner more about Schiller than he had ever heard in his life about any one person; it was perhaps his own fault for having told her that he was not interested in Goethe. When the governess went off picket duty the hostess was again on hand with a not- to-be-gainsaid invitation to visit the cottage of an old woman who remembered Charles James Fox; the woman had been dead for two or three years, but the cottage ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... price and its counterpoise. Dante was alone—except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already in the region of spirits, and meet him there—Casella, Forese; Guido Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and writes as a friendless ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... would enable Letty to visit the museums. She had a hopeful idea that Letty would absorb German at every pore once she was in the country itself, and that being brought face to face with the statues of Goethe and Schiller on their native soil would kindle the sparks of interest in German literature that she supposed every well-taught child possessed, into the roaring flame of enthusiasm. She could not believe that Letty had no sparks. One of her children being so abnormally ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Mr. Carlyle had a dinner party, at which was a witty, French, flippant sort of a man, named Lewes,[17] author of a "History of Philosophy," and now writing a life of Goethe, a task for which he must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle a little—of which one was glad, for that night he was in his acrid mood; and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... did not know that there is something higher, even, than patient endurance, and so we say to them, with Goethe, instead: ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... illustrate German life, literature, and history; and the advanced electives are carefully guarded, so that no student may elect courses in modern German, the novel and the drama, who has not already been well grounded in Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing. The drastic thoroughness with which unpromising students are weeded out of the courses in German enhances rather than defeats their ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Purusha is the philosophical term for the Primordial Male, of which Prakriti is the female antithesis. The god is combining Goethe and Swinburne: the "eternal feminine" and the "holy spirit ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... that did not burn, and water that would nearly obliterate, but not drown. But more wonderful still is the information we pick up, or pick out bit by bit, as strange things glimmer into shape. "Light and Colour, (Goethe's Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the book of Genesis." Such is the unexpected announcement of the catalogue. But further to account for so remarkable a jumble as we are to behold, Mr Turner adds the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... any office, whether as tutor, librarian, or chamberlain. In one quarter only is he well received—namely, by the famous Duke of Weimar; but in a few days he becomes madly jealous of the duke's more famous proteges, Goethe and Wieland, and goes off declaiming against them and German literature generally—with which literature he was wholly unacquainted. From Weimar to Berlin; where there are Jews to whom he has introductions. Casanova thinks them ignorant, superstitious, and knavish; but they lend him money, and he ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... ephemeral literature. The majority of men act on too imperfect knowledge, because they will not take the time and exercise the patience to study the facts and principles relating to any given subject, and to do their own thinking. Goethe says: "To act is easy, to think is hard." The remedy is found in the college courses of study which involve the study of ourselves through psychology, logic, and mental, moral, political and social philosophy, and the study of nature through the sciences ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... life, he indicates clearly enough that his faith was neither that of the ordinary theist, the atheist, nor the pantheist, but that his religious theory of the universe was identical with that suggested by Spinoza, adopted by Goethe, and recently elaborated in the first part of the "First Principles" of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Moreover, while Lessing cannot be considered an antagonist of Christianity, neither did he assume the ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... many of Mr. Brown's papers are models of judicial conscientiousness. And Mr. Darwin's evident delight at discovering that some one else has "said his good things before him," or has been on the verge of uttering them, seemingly equals that of making the discovery himself. It reminds one of Goethe's insisting that his views in morphology must have been held before him and must be somewhere on record, so obvious did they ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Guizot, Ranke, Green and Freeman; biographies of Caesar, Leo, Lorenzo, Frederick, Elizabeth, and Napoleon! How they will feed on the literature of modern nations, from Chaucer through Tennyson; from Luther through Goethe; from Rabelais through Victor Hugo; from Bryant and Irving through Hawthorne and Longfellow! How much they will translate from Homer and Virgil and Tacitus; from Schiller, Racine, Fenelon, and Moliere! How much philosophy they will read from Darwin, Spencer, Huxley! How they will trace the ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... 'New Monthly' he thought very clever and brilliant, and was fond of repeating them. You have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, that Motley's first appearance in print was in the 'Collegian.' He brought me one day, in a very modest mood, a translation from Goethe, which I was most happy to oblige him by inserting. It was very prettily done, and will now be a curiosity. . . . How it happened that Motley wrote only one piece I do not remember. I had the pleasure about that time of initiating him as a member of the Knights ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of his. But of the misbegotten changelings who call themselves men, and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw one who seemed worthy to inspire love - no, nor read of any, except Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth. About women I entertain a somewhat different opinion; but there, I have the misfortune ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of mine that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40, Nature's object being to make him go to bed for several months. Sometimes Nature overdoes it: Schiller and Mozart died. Goethe survived, though he very nearly followed Schiller into the shades. I did the thing myself quite handsomely by spending eighteen months on crutches, having two surgical operations, and breaking my arm. I distinctly noticed that instead ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... will entertain with fiddlers and cream; then every guest leaves his high desire with his hat, leaves himself behind, and descends to fiddlers and cream. But men rise to associate; in sinking they separate; and the good host must call us up, not drag us down to his feast. Goethe knows how to spread the table with portfolios, architecture, music, drawing, tableaux; but a great love, with its inevitable thought, makes even these solvents superfluous. Goethe studies the cemetery, the chapel, the school, the gallery, the burial-service, the estate,—whatever is nearest. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... the people to which Goethe belonged? At a time when a common cause with Austria conjures up again the shade of the dear old Holy Roman Empire no other verse in Faust seems so inept as that concerning the ugly political song. Today we should rather say "An unpolitical song, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... and many valuable suggestions; to Prof. Feuling, the eminent philologist, of the University of Wisconsin, for his literal version of the extracts from the "Deutsche Theologie," which preserve the quaintness of the original, and to Mrs. F. M. Brown, for her metrical version of Goethe's almost untranslatable lines, "Ueber allen Gipfeln, ist Ruh," which form the keynote of the beautiful harmony in the character of ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... pronounce lightly those awful vows which we utter before God at the altar. I believe, if she knew that her life was futile, it is but of late she has thought it could be otherwise, and that she might mend it. I have read (besides that poem of Goethe of which you are so fond) in books of Indian travels of Bayaderes, dancing-girls brought up by troops round about the temples, whose calling is to dance, and wear jewels, and look beautiful; I believe they are quite respected in—in Pagoda-land. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dear boy," said Michel Chrestien; "we are looking forward. We are afraid lest some day you may prefer a petty revenge to the joys of pure friendship. Read Goethe's Tasso, the great master's greatest work, and you will see how the poet-hero loved gorgeous stuffs and banquets and triumph and applause. Very well, be Tasso without his folly. Perhaps the world and its pleasures ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... followed by comic groups, six of which illustrated Goethe's fable of "Reinecke the Fox," and were skilfully managed as well as ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... artist in the evidently planned and orderly intermixing of male and female rhymes, i.e. rhymes which fall on the last syllable and those which fall on the last but one. Now, every careful student of the versification of Faust must feel and see that Goethe did not intersperse the one kind of rhyme with the other, at random, as those translators do; who, also, give the female rhyme (on which the vivacity of dialogue and description often so much depends,) ...
— Faust • Goethe
... Russian. It is certain that no modern European tongue has been able fairly to represent the beauty of Pushkin's verse, to make foreigners feel him as Russians feel him, in any such measure as the Germans succeeded with Shakespeare, as Bayard Taylor with Goethe, as Ludwig Fulda with Rostand. The translations of Pushkin and of Lermontov have never impressed foreign readers in the superlative degree. The glory of English literature is its poetry; the glory of Russian literature is its ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... is—conflict. Voltaire in one of his letters said that every scene in a play should represent a combat. In "Memories and Portraits," Stevenson says: "A good serious play must be founded on one of the passionate cruces of life, where duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple." Goethe, in his "William Meister" says: "All events oppose him [the hero] and he either clears and removes every obstacle out of his path, or else becomes their victim." But it was the French critic, Ferdinand Brunetiere, who defined dramatic law most sharply and ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... nearly played. Gretchen's heart thrilled—oh to be an actress, an actress! On her twenty-fourth birthday von Bottiburgen[16] tells us, Gretchen left home, and went to Berlin. She wanted to get an interview with Goethe. One day, after she had been in Berlin a little while, she found him. Brampenrich describes the scene for us, so beautifully and with such ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... to art what Goethe said of poetry we find that among its votaries there are two kinds of self-half-informed people, "dilettanti," he calls them, "he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and he thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... Aufklaerung, according to the aspiration of Duke Carl, was effected by other hands; Lessing and Herder, brilliant precursors of the age of genius which centered in Goethe, coming well within the natural limits of Carl's lifetime. As precursors Goethe gratefully recognised them, and understood that there had been a thousand others, looking forward to a new era in German literature ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... been despoiled at an average age of eight years. Looking upon the forlorn little creatures, who are often brought into the Chicago juvenile court to testify against their own relatives, one is seized with that curious compunction Goethe expressed in the now hackneyed line ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... an admirer of German literature and a defender of the French Revolution. He is credited with having first inspired his friend Southey with a liking for poetry. He travelled much abroad, met Goethe, attended the National Assembly debates in 1790, translated from the German and contributed to a ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... fifty years, we may most assuredly proclaim him a priest in the sense of elder, or leader of men. One whom schools of thought, represented by men so opposed as Mill, Renan, Matthew Arnold, Spinoza, Goethe, Napoleon and Rousseau, conspired to honour must have been indeed a "king of men". But this is not what is meant by the question. By priest we mean here what the ecclesiastic means, namely, one who ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... He will obtain no information of men, scenery, or remarkable places, such as he might receive from a common tourist, deficient equally in sentiment and imagination; neither will he carry away such clear pictures and representations as Scott or Goethe might stamp upon his memory. He will simply be informed of the thoughts, fancies, opinions, and varying moods of Lamartine, as awakened by the objects which met his eye. These objects, which a great poet would consider of the first importance, are with the Frenchman only secondary to the exhibition ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... hark back to the sweetness and light and music of the primeval world than the veriest wigwam-dweller that ever chipped an arrowhead. It is not so much what the primitive man can give us as what we can find in him that is worth our while. The light that a Goethe, a Thoreau, or a Kipling can project into Arcadia is mirrored in his ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... solidarity of poetic geniuses. Not only is the great figure of Bodli proof of this solidarity, but many other features of this poem prove it. "Lively feeling for a situation and power to express it constitute the poet," said Goethe. There are dramatic situations in "The Lovers of Gudrun" which hold the reader in a breathless state till the last word is said, and then leave him marveling at the imagination that could conceive the scene, and the power that could express it. There are gentler scenes, too, in ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... 'sound learning.' Whether standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or Aquinas against Erasmus, or Galen against Vesalius, or making mechanical Greek verses at Eton, instead of studying the handiwork of the Almighty, or reading Euripides with translations instead of Leasing and Goethe in the original, the cry always is for 'sound learning.' The idea always is ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... something that might be termed shrewd; ironical, and derisive. In fact, his face bore no bad resemblance to that of Mephistopheles, as represented in Retsch's powerful conception and delineation of it in his illustration of Goethe's "Faust," so inimitably translated ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... countries vary but little, are noted for a grave and serious deportment. The land that has given birth to Shakspeare and Milton has no reason to complain of the want of warmth of imagination. Klopstock and Goethe,—the latter now allowed to be first of the living poets,—are instances of the wide range of the spirit of poetry. Shall we, who have seen Byron writing, as it were, in the midst of us, yield assent to calling Greece and Italy the countries of imagination, par excellence, because they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... "Moonlight Sonata," which is dedicated to her. He wrote her the most adoring letters; but the union, which he seemed to desire so intensely, was never brought about, though the reason is not known. For Bettina von Arnim, Goethe's little friend, he conceived a tender affection. Another love of his was for the Countess Marie Erdoedy, to whom he dedicated the two fine Trios, Op. 70, but this was also a purely Platonic affection. The composer ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... of my readers never heard of him before; nor, in writing or otherwise, is there symptom that any living memory now harbors him, or has the least approach to an image of him! "For the times are babbly," says Goethe," And then ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... one. "Sublime!" exclaimed another; and the most amazing criticism came from yet another,—"Goethe with ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... to literature, the same thing is true, and you find works of literature which may be said to be pure art. A little song of Shakespeare or of Goethe is pure art; it is exquisitely beautiful, although its intellectual content may be nothing. A series of pictures is made to pass before your mind by the meaning of words, and the effect is a melody of ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his fair name the terrible Aristophanes himself affixes no brand [339]. The sweetness of his genius extended indeed to his temper, and personal popularity assisted his public triumphs. Nor does he appear to have keenly shared the party animosities of his day; his serenity, like that of Goethe, has in it something of enviable rather than honourable indifference. He owed his first distinction to Cimon, and he served afterward under Pericles; on his entrance into life, he led the youths that circled ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... India into a modern Eden by irrigation; would have laid railways from Cape Town to the remotest corner of Africa; would have dug the Panama Canal; and, in addition, would have sent a translation of the Bible, of Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, and Dante to every family on the globe. In a word, the wealth spent on wars in the last half century would have transformed life for a majority of human beings. The stoppage of this waste will shorten the hours of labor, reduce pauperism, elevate ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... mathematics, natural philosophy, or contemporary literature he cared nothing whatever. However, he knew how to be silent in conversation, as well as when to make general remarks on authors whom he had never read—such as Goethe, Schiller, and Byron. Moreover, despite his exclusively French education, he was simple in speech and hated originality (which he called the mark of an untutored nature). Wherever he lived, society was a necessity to him, and, both in Moscow and the country he had his reception ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... short halt at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and found it an interesting city. I would have liked to visit the birthplace of Gutenburg, but it could not be done, as no memorandum of the site of the house has been kept. So we spent an hour in the Goethe mansion instead. The city permits this house to belong to private parties, instead of gracing and dignifying herself with the honor of possessing and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... accost of Goethe, "Vous etes un homme," and "as Goethe left the room, Napoleon repeated to Berthier and Daru, 'Voila un homme!'" ("The Life of ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... authorship, had been so much preoccupied with higher things that he had left the fleshpots and the loaves and fishes to others, and was to be compensated with a share of the divine honors paid to Jove himself. From Goethe to Carlyle, what a long roll of gods, demigods, and demisemigods it was! It might have been bad for the deities, and the philosopher rather thought it was, but burning incense on the different shrines ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... come to him so soon. The whole man too was so different from what she had thought him to be. Before their marriage no word as to money had ever reached her ears from his lips. He had talked to her of books,—and especially of poetry. Shakespeare and Moliere, Dante and Goethe, had been or had seemed to be dear to him. And he had been full of fine ideas about women, and about men in their intercourse with women. For his sake she had separated herself from all her old friends. For his sake she had hurried into a marriage altogether distasteful to her father. For his ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... At that time I was teaching myself German, and I sat one day puzzling out two lines of Goethe: ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... with practical, everyday talents, able to be honest and make shoes and sew garments; to strike with a sledge and a blacksmith's arm; to be adepts, maybe, in all the cares for the outward wants of the body, but who had never read Goethe or Schiller, and, possibly, neither Shakespeare, Scott nor Robert Burns; and might not care to read or study Latin, French, German or philosophy! It was for Mr. Ripley ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... few chapters in the biography of the childhood of men of genius more significant than those which describe imaginary worlds which were, for a time, as real as the actual world in which the boy lived. Goethe entertained and mystified his playmates with accounts of a certain garden in which he wandered at will, but which they could not find; and De Quincey created a kingdom, with all its complex relations and varied activities, which he ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... have been better to call his work, "The History of the Development or Evolution of Nature,"—deals, in the first six lectures, with the general and historical aspects of the question, and contains a very interesting and lucid account of the views of Linnaeus, Cuvier, Agassiz, Goethe, Oken, Kant, Lamarck, Lyell, and Darwin, and of the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 1815 declared that Schlegel and his disciples first marked out the right road in aesthetic criticism, and enjoyed at the moment superiority over all English aesthetic critics of Shakespeare. {344} Subsequently Goethe poured forth, in his voluminous writings, a mass of criticism even more illuminating and appreciative than Schlegel's. {345} Although Goethe deemed Shakespeare's works unsuited to the stage, he adapted 'Romeo and ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... rest, anyone looking round would have noticed a spacious writing-table in the window, a large and battered armchair beside the fire, a photograph of Lucy over the mantelpiece, oddly flanked by an engraving of Goethe and the head of the German historian Ranke, a folding cane chair which was generally used by Lucy whenever she visited the room, and the horsehair sofa, whereon Sandy was now sleeping amid a surrounding litter of books and papers which only just left room for his small person. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Ridgeway had got over the fact that it was two o'clock in the morning, and that the cheek of this Tuolumne goddess nearest him was as dewy and fresh as an infant's, that she looked like Marguerite, without, probably, ever having heard of Goethe's heroine, he talked, I dare say, very sensibly. When Miss Jenny—who from her childhood had been brought up among the sons of Anak, and who was accustomed to have the supremacy of our noble sex presented to her as a physical fact—found herself in the presence of a new and strange power in the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... ignore the largest side of human nature, and liveliest element of literary interest. It has an eminence of its own; if it is not great art, it is at least great folly—a superior sort of folly to which none of the masters of letters has ever attained. Not Shakspeare, nor Cervantes, nor Goethe, nor Moliere, nor—no, not even Rabelais—ever achieved that shining pinnacle of propriety to which the latter-day American has aspired, by turning his back upon nature's broad and fruitful levels ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Let Goethe, in his Faust hymn, tell what is the heart and essence of Nature Mysticism as here to ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... begin with. For two days, till last night, I had no night sweats, and my cough is almost gone, and I digest well; so all looks hopeful. However, I was near the other side of Jordan. I send the proof of THOREAU to you, so that you may correct and fill up the quotation from Goethe. It is a pity I was ill, as, for matter, I think I prefer that to any of my essays except Burns; but the style, though quite manly, never attains any melody or lenity. So much for consumption: I begin to appreciate ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the keyboard covered—a fact which shows that the Emperor's test had not been forgotten. It was whilst they were at Frankfort that a boy of fourteen came to one of the concerts and saw Mozart in his frizzled wig and sword, and heard him play. That boy was Goethe the poet. ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... faiths, but will draw foul contagion from the rank mists that float over old and cold fables. For all knowledge is food, as faith is wine, to a genius like Lanier. A poet genius has great common sense. He lives in to-day and to-morrow, not in yesterday. Such men were Shakespeare and Goethe. The age of poetry is not past; there is nothing in culture or science hostile to it. Milton was one of the world's great poets, but he was the most cultured and scholarly and statesmanlike man of his day. He was no dreamer of dead dreams. Neither was ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... possessor of a full purse, with fifty 'jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid' in it. Its possession brought with it the realisation of a paramount desire, the desire for Greece and Italy which had become for him, as it had once been with Goethe, a scarce endurable suffering. The sickness of longing had wellnigh given way to despair, when 'there came into my hands a sum of money (such a poor little sum) for a book I had written. It was early autumn. I chanced to hear some one speak of Naples—and ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing |
