Johann Wolfgang Goethe
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made him a central figure in the Sturm und Drang movement. With Friedrich Schiller, he co-founded Weimar Classicism and spent 50 years on his masterwork Faust. Goethe’s work in botany, anatomy, and color theory influenced Nietzsche and Darwin.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt am Main into a privileged upper middle-class family. His father, Johann Caspar Goethe, was a lawyer, and his mother, Catharina Elisabeth Goethe, encouraged his literary interests. He studied law at Leipzig University from 1765 to 1768, though his passion was literature. After a serious illness, he completed his law degree at the University of Strasbourg in 1771.
Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther 1774 became an international bestseller and established his reputation. In 1775, he moved to Weimar to serve as adviser to Duke Karl August, where he wrote dramas like Egmont and Torquato Tasso. His Italian journey from 1786 to 1788 inspired his classicist turn, leading to the Weimar Classicism movement with Friedrich Schiller. His most famous work, Faust, was published in two parts 1808 and 1832, a project he worked on for over 50 years.
In 1806, Goethe married Christiane Johanna Sophie Vulpius, with whom he had one son, August von Goethe born 1789. He also had a daughter, Ottilie. His only sibling was Cornelia Schlosser. He was a Freemason and had a notable meeting with Napoleon in 1808, who praised his novel Werther. He corresponded with Thomas Carlyle, who translated his works into English.
Goethe is Germany’s greatest poet and playwright. The Goethe-Institut, named after him, promotes German language and culture worldwide. His ideas influenced Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin. The literary estate in the Goethe and Schiller Archives was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2001. He is best remembered for Faust, a cornerstone of Western literature.
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A wall of memorable lines from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
Girls We Love for What They Are; Young Men for What They Promise to Be.
Nothing Shows a Man’s Character More Than What He Laughs At.
If Youth Is a Fault, It Is One That One Gets Rid of Soon Enough.
Smoking Stupefies a Man, and Makes Him Incapable of Thinking or Writing. It Is Only Fit for Idlers, People Who Are Always Bored, Who Sleep for a Third of Their Lifetime, Fritter Away Another Third in Eating, Drinking, and Other Necessary or Unnecessary Affairs, and Don’t Know Though They Are Always Complaining That Life Is so Short What to Do with the Rest of Their Time. Such Lazy Turks Find Mental Solace in Handling a Pipe and Gazing at the Clouds of Smoke That They Puff into the Air; It Helps Them to Kill Time. Smoking Induces Drinking Beer, for Hot Mouths Need to Be Cooled Down. Beer Thickens the Blood, and Adds to the Intoxication Produced by the Narcotic Smoke. the Nerves Are Dulled and the Blood Clotted. If They Go on as They Seem to Be Doing Now, in Two or Three Generations We Shall See What These Beer Swillers and Smoke Puffers Have Made of Germany. You Will Notice the Effect on Our Literature Mindless, Formless, and Hopeless; and Those Very People Will Wonder How It Has Come About. and Think of the Cost of It All! Fully 25,000,000 Thalers a Year End in Smoke All Over Germany, and the Sum May Rise to Forty, Fifty, or Sixty Millions. the Hungry Are Still Unfed, and the Naked Unclad. What Can Become of All the Money? Smoking, Too, Is Gross Rudeness and Unsociability. Smokers Poison the Air Far and Wide and Choke Every Decent Man, Unless He Takes to Smoking in Self Defence. Who Can Enter a Smoker’s Room Without Feeling Ill? Who Can Stay There Without Perishing?
Do Not, I Beg You, Look for Anything Behind Phenomena. They Are Themselves Their Own Lesson.
Anyone Who Tortures Animals Has No Soul and Lacks God’s Good Spirit, No Matter How Noble He May Look, You Should Never Trust Him.
If You Like Someone, You Have to Understand Them. You Don’t Always Have to See Your Mistakes Here and There. Look with Love and Forgiveness, Because in the End You Yourself Are Not Flawless.
I Like to Remember the Times When All My Limbs Were Flexible Except for One. but Those Times Are Over, All Limbs Have Become Stiff Except for One.
Where Right Becomes Wrong, Resistance Becomes a Duty.
Anyone Who Does Not Want to Comply with the Laws Must Leave the Area Where They Apply.
The World Is Full of Folly, Dullness, Inconsistency and Injustice; It Takes a Lot of Courage Not to Give up on Them and Move Aside.
It Is One of the Saddest Conditions Under Which We Suffer to Find Ourselves Separated, Not Only by Death, but Also by Life, from Those Whom We Value and Love Most and Whose Cooperation Could Best Benefit Us.
One Must Always Repeat the Truth, Because Error Is Constantly Being Preached Around Us, and Not by Individuals, but by the Masses. in Newspapers and Encyclopedias, at Schools and Universities, Everywhere, Error Is at the Forefront, and It Is Comfortable and Comfortable with the Feeling of the Majority Being on Its Side.
It’s Not Enough to Know You Also Have to Apply. It’s Not Enough to Want You Also Have to Do.
Nature Has Placed in Every Good Heart the Feeling That It Cannot Be Happy on Its Own and That It Must Seek Its Happiness in the Good of Others.
It’s Better to Decide About Right Than Exactly Wrong.
No One Is More a Slave Than He Who Thinks He Is Free Without Being So.
Nothing Defines People’s Character More Than What They Find Ridiculous.
The Most Powerful Fantasy Is Public Opinion: No One Knows Exactly Who Makes It, No One Has Ever Met It Personally, but Everyone Allows Themselves to Be Tyrannized by It!
What No One Dares, You Should Dare, What No One Says, Says What No One Thinks, Dares to Think What No One Starts, Carries It Out.
Tell Me Who You Associate With, and I Will Tell You Who You Are; If I Know What You’re Busy With, I Know What You Can Become.
Children Should Get Two Things from Their Parents: Roots and Wings.
Whoever Strives Hard, / We Can Redeem Him.
The Newspaper Writer Himself Is Really to Be Deplored / He Often Knows Nothing and Is Often Not Allowed to Say Anything.
Happy When the Days Flow, Alternating Between Joy and Sorrow, Between Creating and Enjoying, Between the World and Loneliness.
What You Have Inherited from Your Fathers, Acquire It to Possess It! What You Don’t Use, Is a Heavy Burden.
But I Am What I Am, and Just Accept Me! If You Want to Own Better Ones, Have Them Carved for You!
When Your Head and Heart Are Buzzing, What Better Could You Want! Anyone Who No Longer Loves and No Longer Makes Mistakes, Let Them Be Buried.
Treat People as They Are and They Will Get Worse. Treat People as They Could Be and They Will Get Better!
Of All Nations, the Greeks Dreamed the Dream of Life Most Beautifully.
If You Make Yourself Too Green, the Goats Will Eat You.
Do You Want to Keep Rambling? See the Good Is so Close. Just Learn to Seize Happiness: Because Happiness Is Always There.
Nature Doesn’t Know How to Joke, It Is Always True, Always Serious, Always Strict, It Is Always Right, and the Mistakes and Errors Are Always Human.
The Purpose of Life Is Life Itself.
I Want to Be Free in Thinking and Writing. the World Limits Our Actions Enough.
It’s Not That the Friends Come Together, but That They Agree.
Every Beginning Is Easy, and the Last Steps Are the Hardest and Most Rarely Climbed.
Everybody Only Hears What He Understands.
You’ve Only Really Been Where You’ve Been on Foot.
That’s the Last Word; He Deserves Freedom Like Life, Who Has to Conquer It Every Day.
There’s No Way That’s Right with This World; in Vain You Are Good, in Vain You Are Efficient, She Wants Us to Be Tame, She Even Wants Us to Be Worthless!
The Spirits I Called, / I Can’t Get Rid of Them Now.
As Soon as the Mind Is Focused on a Goal, Many Things Come Towards It.
Have You Researched the Inner Relationships of an Action? Do You Know with Certainty How to Develop the Causes, Why It Happened, Why It Had to Happen? If You Had That, You Wouldn’t Be so Hasty in Your Judgments!
He Who Does Not Love Music Does Not Deserve to Be Called a Human Being; He Who Only Loves Her Is Only Half a Person; but Whoever Does It Is a Whole Person.
I’m Writing You a Long Letter Because I Don’t Have Time to Write a Short One.
If You Want to Find Joy in the Whole, You Have to See the Whole in the Smallest Things.
Little-known facts about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
Germany’s greatest poet and playwright, Goethe is often called the Shakespeare of German literature.
He worked on the Faust books for over 50 years and finished the second part shortly before his death.
Goethe’s IQ has been estimated at 210, though such measures are speculative.
Terribly afraid of dogs, Goethe personified Mephistopholes as a black poodle in Faust Part 1.
His close friendship with Friedrich Schiller is commemorated by a statue in front of the Theater in Weimar, Germany.
Born at 12:30 pm LMT.
He had a daughter named Ottilie.
Great-great-grandfather of the musician Bertie Higgins.
His only son with Christiane, August von Goethe, was born December 25, 1789, and died October 27, 1830.
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written.
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six representative men in his work of the same name.
Goethe’s ideas on evolution framed questions that Darwin and Wallace approached scientifically.
The Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural institution, promotes German language and culture abroad.
Goethe’s reputation led to Weimar being chosen in 1919 as the venue for Germany’s national assembly, which drafted the constitution of the Weimar Republic.
His first major scientific work, Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after his return from Italy in 1788.
During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe served on the Duke’s privy council, oversaw silver mines, and implemented administrative reforms at the University of Jena.
In Victorian England, Thomas Carlyle wrote multiple essays on Goethe and translated his works, introducing him to English readers.
Nikola Tesla was heavily influenced by Goethe’s Faust, which he had memorized; it inspired his rotating magnetic field idea.
Goethe’s scientific ideas have much in common with Denis Diderot’s; both rejected mathematical interpretations of nature and saw art and science as compatible.
George Eliot presented Goethe as a man who helps us rise to a lofty point of observation.
Matthew Arnold called Goethe the Physician of the Iron Age and a large, liberal thinker.
During his meeting with Napoleon in 1808, Napoleon remarked, Vous êtes un homme, and had read The Sorrows of Young Werther seven times.
Goethe was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang movement.
His works include plays, poetry, literature, aesthetic criticism, and treatises on botany, anatomy, and color.
Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November 1775 after the success of The Sorrows of Young Werther, and was ennobled in 1782.
Along with Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Beethoven, Goethe straddled the Age of Reason and Romanticism.
He was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic.
The literary estate of Goethe in the Goethe and Schiller Archives was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2001.
In 1791 he became managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 began a friendship with Friedrich Schiller that defined Weimar Classicism.
Goethe is the greatest and most influential writer in the German language.
He produced volumes of poetry, essays, criticism, a theory of colours, and early work on evolution and linguistics.
Goethe’s Naturanschauer is in many ways a sequel to Diderot’s interprète de la nature.
His unorthodox religious beliefs led him to be called the great heathen and provoked distrust among authorities.
The Faust tragedy, often called Das Drama der Deutschen, is his most characteristic creation.
Born into a Lutheran family, Goethe’s early faith was shaken by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years’ War.
At age 23, Goethe wrote Mahomets Gesang about a river, part of his Sturm und Drang years.
He was a Freemason, joining lodge Amalia in Weimar in 1780.
Fascinated by mineralogy, the mineral goethite is named after him.
He showed interest in Islam and other religions, but attempts to claim him for any religion are considered pointless.
He was attracted to the Bavarian Illuminati, founded on May 1, 1776.
A year before his death, Goethe wrote that he aspired to be a Hypsistarian, reverencing what is best and most perfect.
His non-fiction writings spurred thinkers like Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Cassirer, and Jung.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Celebrities similar to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — same craft, ranked by reach.
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