quote · Source-linked selection
The most insignificant man can be complete if he works within the limits of his capacities, innate or acquired; but even fine talents can be obscured, neutralised, and destroyed by lack of this indispensable requirement of symmetry. This is a mischief which will often occur in modern times; for who will be able to come up to the claims of an age so full and intense as this, and one too that moves so rapidly?
The most insignificant man can be complete if he works within the limits of his capacities, innate or acquired; but even fine talents can be obscured, neutralised, and destroyed by lack of this indispensable requirement of symmetry. This is a mischief which will often occur in modern times; for who will be able to come up to the claims of an age so full and intense as this, and one too that moves so rapidly?
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 18; Bailey Saunders English translation, New York: The Macmillan Company,1906
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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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