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Goethe: Painted portrait, 1828Painted portrait, 1828Joseph Karl Stieler · Public domain

1,545 source-linked selections

Goethe

Life dates: 1749 AD — 1832 AD

German writer and natural researcher whose observations on action and thought reward comparing adjacent maxims. Historical English translation and attribution remain explicit.

Source editions and anthology attributions are not the same evidence level. Read the selection standard ↗

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Life and writing

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) worked in literature, public administration and the study of nature. The Weimar library describes his involvement in the theatre, investigations of colour and plants, and long responsibility for its collections. These activities offer context for reflections that move between conduct, art and inquiry. They do not make each short observation a scientific finding or a rule that applies to every reader.

The linked 1906 Saunders translation begins by asking how earlier thoughts can become a reader’s own, then connects self-knowledge with action and the demands of the day. Read maxims 1–3 together: reconsidering an idea and testing oneself through conduct are related tasks. The edition’s introduction explains that its material was collected and arranged, and that the translator adjusted some ordering. Its English sequence is a reading route, not a diary of when Goethe composed the thoughts.

Reading this voice

Start with maxims 1–3 in Life and Character, then compare the introduction’s account of arrangement. The two selected passages come from the retained Saunders source units. The profile follows the established Goethe entity and its 1,593 associated records; it neither merges separately supplied Goethe labels nor authenticates all their wording. The 1906 edition link now resolves to this historical entity. Lifetime-based entry coordinates remain approximate and are not composition dates.

Subjects to explore

mindknowledgecharacterlearning

Words to begin with

Profile sources and editorial notes

Agent-assisted editorial profile, updated 2026-10-05. A human reviewer is not recorded. Biographical context does not independently authenticate every quotation attributed to this person.

Quotations and sayings

18c. 1790 AD
He considered the idea as a thing of the mind, that had, it is true, no reality, but still, on passing away, left a residuum—a caput mortuum—to which some reality could not be altogether refused. We may think this a very perverse and material notion; but when he entertained his friends with the neverending consequences of his life and actions, in full belief and confidence in them, he expressed himself quite differently. Then, indeed, he was ready to admit that life produces life; that a fruitful act has effects to all time. He took pleasure in confessing that he had given a great impulse, a new direction, to the course of the world's affairs.
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19c. 1790 AD
It always remains a very remarkable fact that men whose whole personality is almost all idea, are so extremely shy of all phantasy. In this case was Hamann, who could not bear the mention of "things of another world." He took occasion to express himself on this point in a certain paragraph, which he wrote in fourteen different ways; and still, apparently, he was never quite satisfied with it. Two of these attempts have been preserved to us; a third we have ourselves attempted, which we are induced to print here by the preceding observations.
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20c. 1790 AD
Man is placed as a real being in the midst of a real world, and endowed with such organs that he can perceive and produce the real and also the possible. All healthy men have the conviction of their own existence and of an existence around them. However, even the brain contains a hollow spot, that is to say, a place in which no object is mirrored; just as in the eye itself there is a little spot that does not see. If a man pays particular attention to this spot and is absorbed in it, he falls into a state of mental sickness, has presentiments of "things of another world," which are, in reality, no things at all; possessing neither form nor limit, but alarming him like dark, empty tracts of night, and pursuing him as something more than phantoms, if he does not tear himself free from them.
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