quote · Words worth keeping
Authority. Man cannot exist without it, and yet it brings in its train just as much of error as of truth. It perpetuates one by one things which should pass away one by one; it rejects that which should be preserved and allows it to pass away; and it is chiefly to blame for mankind's want of progress.
Authority. Man cannot exist without it, and yet it brings in its train just as much of error as of truth. It perpetuates one by one things which should pass away one by one; it rejects that which should be preserved and allows it to pass away; and it is chiefly to blame for mankind's want of progress.
Approximate historical placement: c. 1790 AD · early modern
Meaning not yet available
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- Author or tradition
- Goethe
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
A country attribution does not establish the earliest origin. - Historical period
- Approximate historical placement: c. 1790 AD · early modern
author lifetime midpoint (1749–1832); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime or approximate period is not necessarily the date when these words were written or spoken. - Recorded source
- Maxims and Reflections (1906) (1906 AD)
Printed maxim 534; Bailey Saunders English translation, New York: The Macmillan Company,1906
A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.
The voice behind the words.
Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.
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