Tag: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today’s One-Liner (#65)

I  want to defend my culture, not theirs, and I inform you that I like Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare and  Goethe and Verlaine and Walt Whitman and Leopardi much more than Omar Khayyam. –Oriana Fallaci,…

Amongst My Books

“… at least resolve, while you remain in any settled residence, to spend a certain number of hours every day amongst your books…”—Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson “Amongst”  could…

By Little and Little

If you can just manage five minutes a day [to meditate], then do that. It is important to do whatever you can, no matter how little.—Dipa Ma I once wrote for a magazine: I made…

When Life Starts to Improve

Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the…

Neither Conformism Nor Eccentricity

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007 Almost twelve years ago I read this book, and the themes of Bildung and mastery were most…

Wherever We Are Useful

Katharina Mommsen, Goethe’s Art of Living Trafford, 2003 Translators: John Crosetto, John Whaley, Renee M. Schell A teacher who can awaken a sense of a single good deed or a single good poem accomplishes more…

A Call to Life and Deeds: Goethe’s Maxims

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections   Translated by Elisabeth Stopp; edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Hutchinson; Penguin Books, 1998 I’ve been reading Pierre Hadot’s 2008 book, N’oublie pas de vivre:…

The Seeds at Work within Us

Years ago, I read with pleasure Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections (translated by Elisabeth Stopp). A good number of them are worth revisiting, much like many of those I’ve encountered over the years from La Rochefoucauld,…