"One does not get to know that one exists until one rediscovers oneself in others." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1775)
"The study and appreciation of nature comes easier than that of art. The lowliest product of nature embodies the sphere of its perfection within itself, and to discover these relationships all I need is eyes to see. I am certain that within a small sphere a wholly true existence is confined. In a work of art, on the other hand, the principle of its perfection lies outside itself. There is most important of all the artists idea, rarely if ever matched by his execution. There are furthermore certain implicit laws which, though stemming from the nature of the craft, are not so easy to understand and decipher as the laws of living nature. In works of art there is always a large traditional factor, whereas the works of nature are like a word of God spoken this instant." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1786)
"Let the poet confine his use of individual models to what is necessary to make his subject alive and convincing. As for all the rest, let him rely on the living world as mirrored in his bosom." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1789)
"No hypothesis can lay claim to any value unless it assembles many phenomena under one concept." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1795)
"That the observation of nature leads to thinking; that its abundance makes us resort to a variety of methods in order to manipulate it even to some degree on this there seems to be general agreement. But only a limited few are equally aware of the fact that the contemplation of nature suggests ideas to which we ascribe the same degree of certainty as to nature itself a greater degree, in fact; and that we have a right to be guided by these ideas both in our search for data and in our attempts to arrange what we have found." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1801)
"The imagination lurks as the most powerful foe. It has an irresistible affinity for the absurd. Even cultured individuals are subject to this impulse to a high degree. It is hostile to all civilized life and it confronts our decorous society with a reversion to the innate rudeness of the savage and his love of grimaces." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Annals", 1805)
"Former ages thought in terms of images of the imagination, whereas we moderns have concepts. Formerly the guiding ideas of life presented themselves in concrete visual form as divinities, whereas today they are conceptualized. The ancients excelled in creation; our own strength lies rather in destruction, in analysis." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1806)
"Each item of knowledge involves a second, a third step, and so on ad infinitum. If we pursue the life of the tree in its roots, or in its branches and twigs, one thing always follows from another. And the more vitally any concern of knowledge takes hold of us, the more we find ourselves driven to pursue it in its ramifications, both up and down." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Annals", 1807)
"Genuine works of art carry their own aesthetic theory implicit within them and suggest the standards according to which they are to be judged." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808)
"Close observers of nature, however diverse their points of view, will agree that everything of a phenomenal nature must suggest either an original duality capable of being merged in unity, or an original unity capable of becoming a duality. Separating what is united and uniting what is separate is the life of nature. This is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal synkrisis and diakrisis, the breathing in and out of the world in which we move and have our being." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "On Theory of Color", 1810)
"In the sciences everything depends on what one calls an aperçu - the discovery of something that is at the bottom of phenomena. Such a discovery is infinitely fruitful." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "On Theory of Color", 1810)
"The highest gift we have received from God and nature is life, the rotating movement of the monad about itself, knowing neither pause nor rest. The impulse to nurture this life is ineradicably implanted in each individual, although its specific nature remains a mystery to ourselves and to Others." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "On Theory of Color", 1810)
"The modern age has a false sense of superiority because of the great mass of data at its disposal. But the valid criterion of distinction is rather the extent to which man knows how to form and master the material at his command." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "On Theory of Color", 1810)
"We might venture the statement that the history of science is science itself. We cannot really know what we possess until we have learned to know what others have possessed before us." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "On Theory of Color", 1810)
"As soon as we proceed from the principle that knowledge and faith are not designed to cancel each other out but rather to supplement each other, we are on the right path pointing to just solutions." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1813)
"Faith is a sacred vessel in which each individual is prepared to sacrifice his feeling, his reason, his imagination, to the best of his ability. In the case of knowledge exactly the opposite holds true, I said. Not that one knows but what one knows, how well and how much one knows, is what counts. That is why knowledge is a subject for argument, inasmuch as it may be corrected, expanded, and concealed. Knowledge begins with isolated facts; it is endless and formless, and we can at most dream of grasping it as a totality. Hence it is diametrically opposed to faith." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "The Autobiography", 1814)
"The touchstone of genuine poetry is that it has the ability, as a secular gospel, to liberate us from the weight of our earthly burden by an inner serenity and an outward sense of well-being." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "The Autobiography", 1814)
"Idea and experience will never coincide in the center. Only art and action can effect a synthesis." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1816)
"When all is said and done, nothing suits the theater except what also makes a symbolic appeal to the eyes a significant action suggesting an even more significant one." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Shakespeare and No End", 1816)
"That which is formed is straightway transformed again, and if we would to some degree arrive at a living intuition of Nature, we must on our part remain forever mobile and plastic, according to her own example." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Morphology", 1817)
"Everything that takes place is a symbol. In representing itself perfectly it suggests what lies beyond. In this reflection extreme modesty and extreme pretentiousness seem to me combined." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1818)
"As we contemplate the edifice of the universe, in its vastest extension, in its minutest divisibility, we cannot resist the notion that an idea underlies the whole, according to which God and Nature creatively interact forever and ever. Intuition, contemplation, reflection give us an approach to these mysteries, We are emboldened to venture upon ideas; in a more modest mood we fashion concepts that might bear some analogy to those primal beginnings." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Doubts and Resignation", 1820)
"The difficulty of bringing idea and experience into relation with one another makes itself very painfully felt in all investigation of nature. The idea is independent of space and time. Research is limited in space and time. Hence in the idea simultaneous and successive features are most intimately linked, whereas these are always separated in experience; and to think of a process of nature as simultaneous and successive at once, in accordance with the idea, makes our heads spin. The understanding is unable to conceive of those sense data as jointly present which experience transmitted to it one at a time. Thus, the contradiction between ideation and perception remains forever unresolved. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Doubt and Resignation", 1820)
"The symbol. It is the thing without being the thing, and yet the thing: an image concentrated in the mirror of the mind and yet identical with the object. How inferior is allegory by comparison. Though it may have wit and subtle conceit, it is for the most part rhetorical and conventional. It always improves in proportion to its approach to what we call symbol." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Addenda on the Paintings of Philostratus", 1820)
"Mathematics, like dialectics, is an instrument of the inner higher sense, while in practice it is an art like rhetoric. For both of these, nothing has value but form; content is immaterial. Whether mathematics is adding up pennies or guineas, whether rhetoric is defending truth or falsehood, makes no difference to either." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre" ["Reflections in the Spirit of the Wanderers"], 1821)
"All hypotheses get in the way of the anatheorismos the urge to look again, to contemplate the objects, the phenomena in question, from all angles." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"Caught up in the limitless maze, the fragmentation and complication of modern natural science, and yearning for the recapture of simplicity, we must forever ask ourselves: Supposing he had known nature in its present state of complexity, a basic unity withal, how would Plato have coped with it?" (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"Even in the sciences, mere knowing is of no avail. It is always a matter of doing." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"General concepts and great conceit are always poised to make a terrible mess of things." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"It were the height of insight to realize that everything factual as such is, in a sense, theory. The blue of the sky exhibits the basic law of chromatics. There is no sense in looking for something behind phenomena. They are theory." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"Science helps us above all in facilitating that faculty of marveling to which we are destined. Its other function is to provide life in its ceaseless evolution with new techniques for warding off what is harmful and promoting what is useful." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"The highest gift we have received from God and nature is life, the rotating movement of the monad about itself, knowing neither pause nor rest. The impulse to nurture this life is ineradicably implanted in each individual, although its specific nature remains a mystery to ourselves and to Others. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"The most foolish of all errors is for young people to believe that they lose their originality by accepting the truths which have already been accepted by their predecessors." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"Theories are as a rule impulsive reactions of an overhasty understanding which would like to have done with phenomena and therefore substitute images, concepts, or often even just words, in their place. One has an inkling, sometimes even a clear realization, of the fact that a theory is only a dodge. But are not passion and partisanship always on the lookout for dodges? And rightly so, since they are so much in need of them." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"Theory as such is of no use except in so far as it makes us believe in the coherence of phenomena." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"'Natural system' - a contradiction in terms. Nature has no system; she has, she is life and its progress from an unknown center toward an unknowable goal. Scientific research is therefore endless, whether one proceed analytically into minutiae or follow the trail as a whole, in all its breadth and height." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1823)
"There are some problems in natural science which cannot properly be discussed without recourse to metaphysics not in the sense of scholastic verbiage, but as that which was, is, and shall be before, with, and after physics." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1823)
"There can and will be new inventions, but there can be no inventing of anything new as regards the moral nature of man. Everything has already been thought and said; the most we can do is to give it new forms and new phrasing." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1823)
"When Nature begins to reveal her manifest mystery to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter art." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1823)
"Truth is like a torch, but of gigantic proportions. It is all we can do to grope our way with dazzled eyes, in fear even of getting scorched." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1824)
"Man was not born to solve the problems of the universe, but rather to seek to lay bare the heart of the problem and then confine himself within the limits of what is amenable to understanding." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1825)
"The true, which is identical with the divine, transcends our grasp as such. We perceive it only as reflection, parable, symbol, in specific and related manifestations. We become aware of it as life that defies comprehension, and for all that we cannot renounce the wish to comprehend. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Essay on Meteorology", 1825)
"Error finds ceaseless repetition in deed, for which reason one must never tire of repeating the truth in words." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1826)
"True symbolism is present where the specific represents the more general, not as a dream and shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the inscrutable." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1826)
"There is in nature what is within reach and what is beyond reach. Ponder this well and with respect. A great deal is already gained if we impress this general fact upon our mind, even though it always remains difficult to see where the one ends and the other begins. He who is unaware of the distinction may waste himself in lifelong toil trying to get at the inaccessible without ever getting close to truth. But he who knows it and is wise will stick to what is accessible; and in exploring this region in all directions and confirming his gains he will even push back the confines of the inaccessible. Even so he will have to admit in the end that some things can be mastered only to a certain degree and that nature always retain a problematic aspect too deep for human faculties to fathom." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1827)
"Knowing is possible only when one knows little. As one comes to experience more, one gets gradually assailed by doubts. [...] No phenomenon can be explained, taken merely by itself. Only many, surveyed in their connection, and methodically arranged, finally yield something that can pass for theory." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1828)
"The greatest art, both in teaching and in life itself, consists in transforming the problem into a postulate." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1928)
"The vintner's occupation [...] Nature, from whatever angle you approach her, has a glorious way of becoming ever truer, ever more manifest, unfolding ever more, ever deeper, although she remains herself, always the same." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1828)
"For truth is simple and without fuss, whereas error affords opportunity for dissipating time and energy." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1829)
"In music the dignity of art seems to find supreme expression. There is no subject matter to be discounted. It is all form and significant content. It elevates and ennobles whatever it expresses." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1829)
"Man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible. Else he would give up investigating. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1829)
"Music in the best sense does not require the appeal of novelty. As a matter of fact, the older and the more familiar it is, the more it affects us." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1829)
"To concentrate on a craft is the best procedure. For the person of inferior gifts it will always remain a craft. The more gifted person will raise it to an art. And as for the man of highest endowment, in doing one thing he does all things; or, to put it less paradoxically, in the one thing that he does properly, he sees a symbol of all things that are done right. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1829)
"'Nature does nothing for nothing' is an old Philistine saying. She is eternally alive, prodigal and extravagant in her workings, to keep the infinite ever present, because nothing can endure without change." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1831)
"Although we gladly acknowledge Nature's mysterious encheiresis, her faculty of creating and furthering life, and, without being mystics, admit the existence of ultimate limits to our explorations, we are nevertheless convinced that man, if he is serious about it, cannot desist from the attempt to keep encroaching upon the region of the unexplorable. In the end, of course, he has to give up and willingly concede his defeat." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832)
"Hypotheses are scaffoldings erected in front of a building and then dismantled when the building is finished. They are indispensable for the workman; but you mustn't mistake the scaffolding for the building." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1833)
"The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1833)
"Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1833)
"With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1833)
"What is exact about mathematics but exactness? And is not this a consequence of the inner sense of truth?" (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Sprüche in Prosa", 1840)
"Nothing hurts a new truth more than an old error." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Sprüche in Prosa", 1840)
"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"By the word symmetry […] one thinks of an external relationship between pleasing parts of a whole; mostly the word is used to refer to parts arranged regularly against one another around a centre. We have […] observed [these parts] one after the other, not always like following like, but rather a raising up from below, a strength out of weakness, a beauty out of ordinariness." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Content without method leads to fantasy; method without content to empty sophistry; matter without form to unwieldy crudition, form without matter to hollow speculation." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Scientfic Studies", Colleted Works Vol. 12)
"Everything is simpler than one can imagine, at the same time more involved than can be comprehended." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"In science everything depends on what one calls an apercu - the discovery of something that is at the bottom of phenomena. Such a discovery is infinitely fruitful." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"In tearing down a position, all false arguments carry weight; not so in building up. Only the truth is constructive." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections" [posthumous])
"It requires a much higher organ to seize upon truth than it does to defend error." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections" [posthumous])
"Man is not born to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out where the problems begin, and then to take his stand within the limits of the intelligible." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Mathematics must subdue the flights of our reason; they are the staff of the blind; no one can take a step without them; and to them and experience is due all that is certain in physics." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Nature, despite her seeming diversity, is always a unity, a whole; and thus, when she manifests herself in any part of that whole, the rest must serve as a basis for that particular manifestation, and the latter must have a relationship to the rest of the system." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"No phenomenon can be explained in and of itself; only many comprehended together, methodically arranged, in the end yield something that could be regarded as theory." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Sciences destroy themselves in two ways: by the breadth they reach and by the depth they plumb." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing, and of what is not knowable." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Science helps us before all things in this, that it somewhat lightens the feeling of wonder with which Nature fills us; then, however, as life becomes more and more complex, it creates new facilities for the avoidance of what would do us harm and the promotion of what will do us good." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Symbolism transforms the phenomenon into the idea, and the idea into an image in such a fashion that in the image the idea remains infinitely active and incommensurable, and if all languages were used to express it, it would still remain inexpressible." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", [posthumous])
"That is the way of youth and life generally, that we usually come to understand the strategy only after the campaign is over. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "The Autobiography", [posthumous])
"The highest happiness of man as a thinking being is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections" [posthumous])
"The mathematician is perfect only in so far as he is a perfect being, in so far as he perceives the beauty of truth; only then will his work be thorough, transparent, comprehensive, pure, clear, attractive, and even elegant." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"The orbits of certainties touch one another; but in the interstices there is room enough for error to go forth and prevail." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"The tissue of the world is built from necessities and randomness; the intellect of men places itself between both and can control them; it considers the necessity and the reason of its existence; it knows how randomness can be managed, controlled, and used." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Thinking by analogy is not to be despised. Analogy has this merit, that it does not settle things - does not pretend to be conclusive. On the other hand, that induction is pernicious which, with a preconceived end in view, and working right forward for only that, drags in its train a number of unshifted observations, both false and true." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not more so than beholding." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", [posthumous])
"To the mathematician everything appears tangible, comprehensible, and mechanical, and he comes under suspicion of being secretly an atheist, inasmuch as he fancies himself as comprehending in his scheme the most immeasurable essence which we call God, and thereby seems to renounce his specific or pre-eminent existence. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", [posthumous])
No comments:
Post a Comment