United States or Angola ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till he had thought with intensity,... no easy writer he. Neither was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with case. Goethe tells us he "had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no page of his but he knew well how it came there. Schiller "konnte nie fertig werden" never could get done.
In the same conversation with Eckermann from which the first quotation is made, Goethe seems to defy the investigator who would endeavor to define his indebtedness to Sterne, its nature and its measure. The occasion was an attempt on the part of certain writers to determine the authorship of certain distichs printed in both Schiller’s and Goethe’s works. Upon a remark of Eckermann’s that this effort to hunt down a man’s originality and to trace sources is very common in the literary world, Goethe says: “Das ist sehr lächerlich, man könnte ebenso gut einen wohlgenährten Mann nach den Ochsen, Schafen und Schweinen fragen, die er gegessen und die ihm Kräfte gegeben.” An investigation such as Goethe seems to warn us against here would be one of tremendous difficulty, a
"Oh, no!" said he quickly, "I do not aspire to that; I believe in Faust's verse: 'Ich ziehe... meine Schuler an der Nase herum Und sehe dass wir nichts wissen konnen; and I also bilde mir nicht ein, Ich konnte was lehren. I wonder at and envy the men who teach such things with so much influence and conviction, and I am very grateful to them for initiating me into their methods and power of working properly.
I declare solemnly, without exaggeration, that I impute nine-tenths of my present wretchedness, and rather more than nine-tenths of all my faults, to this infernal disorder in the stomach." "Bilious, too, in these smothering windless days." "Broke down in the park; konnte nichts mehr, being sick and weak beyond measure."
Word Of The Day