quote · Source-linked selection
Bodies which rot while they are still alive, and are edified by the detailed contemplation of their own decay; dead men who remain in the world for the ruin of others, and feed their death on the living,—to this have come our makers of literature. When the same thing happened in antiquity, it was only as a strange token of some rare disease; but with the moderns the disease has become endemic and epidemic.
Bodies which rot while they are still alive, and are edified by the detailed contemplation of their own decay; dead men who remain in the world for the ruin of others, and feed their death on the living,—to this have come our makers of literature. When the same thing happened in antiquity, it was only as a strange token of some rare disease; but with the moderns the disease has become endemic and epidemic.
Approximate author period: c. 1790 AD · early modern
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- Author or tradition
- Goethe
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- Approximate author period: c. 1790 AD · early modern
author lifetime midpoint (1749–1832); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- Maxims and Reflections (1906) (1906 AD)
Printed maxim 465; Bailey Saunders English translation, New York: The Macmillan Company,1906
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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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