The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it.
Catalog
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (/ˈɡɜːrtə/; German: [ˈjoːhan ˈvɔlfɡaŋ fɔn ˈɡøːtə]; 28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer and statesman. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him exist. A literary celebrity by the age of 25, Goethe was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Carl August in 1782 after taking up residence there in November 1775 following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. He was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe was a member of the Duke's privy council, sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace, which in 1998 were together designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. His first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy. In 1791, he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in 1805. During this period, Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faus
Talking a lot of nonsense, or even writing it, will kill neither body nor soul, everything will remain unchanged.But nonsense, placed before the eyesHas a magical right:Because it fetters the sensesThe mind remains a vassal.
We have newspapers for all hours of the day. A clever head could still add a few more. This way everything, what everybody does, wants, writes, even what he plans, is publicly exposed. One can only enjoy oneself, or suffer, for the entertainment of others, and in the greatest rush, this is…
Our passions are, in truth, like the phoenix. When the old one burns away, the new one rises out of its ashes at once.
Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
Is not ill-humour in fact our own inner displeasure at our own unworthiness, a feeling of discontent with ourselves, which is always related to envy, which in turn is stirred up by foolish vanity? We see people who are happy and whose happiness is not of our making, and we cannot stand it.
Misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps lead to more complications in the affairs of the world than trickery and wickedness. At least, the two latter are surely more common.
Tell me whom you consort with and I will tell you who you are; if I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you.
To communicate is natural; to accept what is communicated is an acquired art.
Absolute activity, of whatever kind, ultimately leads to bankruptcy.
If monkeys could reach the point of being bored, they could turn into human beings.
There is no situation which cannot be ennobled by work or else by endurance.
Certain books are apparently written not so that we may learn from them but to demonstrate the fact that the author knew something.
The greatest respect an author can have for his public is never to produce what is expected but what he himself considers right and useful for whatever stage of intellectual development have been reached by himself and others.
Art deals with what is hard to bear and with what is good.
Behavior is a mirror in which everyone shows his image.
Advance years bring greater trials.
Surely the world is quite full enough of riddles for us not to need to turn the simplest phenomena into riddles too?