Goethe - Epigrams on possession, happiness, religion, love, literature, nature and knowledge

• We cannot possess what we do not understand.
• Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced.
• Since I have heard often enough that everyone in the end has his own religion, nothing seemed more natural to me than to fashion my own.
• Love's torments sought a place of rest,
  Where all might drear and lonely be;
  They found ere long my desert breast,
  And nestled in its vacancy.
• The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
• Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.
• We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt enters.

Goethe - Epitaph and translations

One version:
-------------

Epitaph

In boyhood stubborn, withdrawn,
In youth presumptuous, suspicious,
When mature, an active man,
In old age reckless, capricious. –
On your gravestones they'll make out:
This one was human, never doubt!



Another version:
-----------------

Epitaph

As a boy, reserved and naughty;
As a youth, a coxcomb and haughty;
As a man, for action inclined;
As a greybeard, fickle in mind. –
Upon they grave will people read:
This was a very man, indeed!




About the only thing which is the same is the last three lines of punctuation!
I think I am really going to have to get the original German poems and read them with a series of translations to hand. Commentators remark on the difficulty (some say "impossibility") of translating Goethe – I certainly have a good feeling for it now (after reading three different translations of various poems).

Goethe - Epigrams on The World, Life and Doing

• The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.
• The passing day is prey to error. Time commands success and achievement.
• Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

Goethe - Every Day (epigram)

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Goethe - Prometheus

Prometheus

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
translated by Erich Harth

---

Cover your heavens
with clouds and vapors, Zeus
and, like the boy who lops off
heads of thistles,
try your hand on oaks
and mountaintops.

But you can't touch my earth,
my cabin that you did not build,
my hearth whose glow you watch
with envy.

There's none more pitiful than you, Gods!
The breath of our prayers
is your paltry nourishment,
our meager altar gifts sustain
your dreams of majesty.
You'd starve
but for the foolish hopes
of children and beggars.

When I was a child and didn't know
which way to turn,
I raised my eyes bewildered to the sky
as though beyond it were an ear
to listen to my sorrows,
a heart like mine
to pity my distress.

Who stood with me against the Titans'
wantonness,
who rescued me from death,
from slavery?
Was it not you, my own, my glowing heart
that did all this?
And, cheated, in your youthful goodness
gave glowing thanks to him
who nods up there?

And I should worship thee? What for?
Have you ever
lightened my pain when I was anguished?
Ever
stilled the tears
when I was frightened?
Was it not almighty time
and eternal fate,
my masters as well as yours,
who forged me into manhood?

Did you, by chance, suppose
that I should hate life,
flee into deserts,
just because
not all my fancy dreams
had come to pass?

I sit here, shaping men and women
in my image,
a race destined, like I,
to suffer and to cry,
to savor joy, to laugh,
and disregard you
as I did.

Goethe - Human Limits (excerpt)

A little ring
Confines our lives,
And many generations
For ever they link
On to their being's
Infinite chain.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "Human Limits" (excerpt, last stanza), p 35 from "Roman Elegies and other poems and epigrams", trans. Michael Hamburger, Anvil, 1996

The Secret of the Universe

This may sound a little strange, but it is not quite so paradoxical as the case of Jacob Boehme, to whom Jove's thunderbolt revealed the secret of the universe while he was looking at a pewter bowl.

[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, p 49, Penguin 60s Classics] [written on 8 October 1786]

Our times are worse than we think

The art of mosaic, which gave the Ancients their paved floors and the Christians the vaulted Heaven of their churches, has now been degraded to snuffboxes and bracelets. Our times are worse than we think.

[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, p 48, Penguin 60s Classics] [written on 8 October 1786]

(Always "our times" are the most degraded and the worst. It wasn't true then Wolfgang (witness your true self) and it isn't true now).

Seeing the World

My tendency to look at the world through the eyes of the painter whose pictures I have seen last has given me an odd idea. Since our eyes are educated from childhood on by the objects we see around us, a Venetian painter is bound to see the world as a brighter and gayer place than most people see it. We northerners who spend our lives in a drab and, because of the dirt and the dust, an uglier country where even reflected light is subdued, and who have, most of us, to live in cramped rooms - we cannot instinctively develop an eye which looks like such delight at the world.

[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, p 47, Penguin 60s Classics] [written on 8 October 1786]

Exactly! Thus, people like living where I live rather than places in the northern hemisphere because of the same brilliance and radiance of light and environment. Makes a difference to the approach to life.

(Also good to know that there is no thought that I can think that has not already been thought hundreds of years before by someone smarter and more eloquent!)