Goethe’s Aphorisms

I'd like to add a short and serene poem which Goethe "probably wrote [...] onto the wall of a wooden gamekeeper lodge on top of the Kickelhahn mountain where he [...] spent the night." [1]

Wandrers Nachtlied ("Wanderer's Nightsong")

    Über allen Gipfeln
    Ist Ruh,
    In allen Wipfeln
    Spürest du
    Kaum einen Hauch;
    Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
    Warte nur, balde
    Ruhest du auch.


    O’er all the hilltops 
    Is quiet now, 
    In all the treetops 
    Hearest thou 
    Hardly a breath; 
    The birds are asleep in the trees: 
    Wait, soon like these 
    Thou too shalt rest. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer%27s_Nightsong

It's hard to overstate the importance of Goethe to German culture and literature. He was a brilliant man with a lively mind. One nonfiction work of his I quite enjoyed is his Theory of Colours[1]. While many dismiss it as "wrong" because it isn't a correct physical theory of wavelengths and spectrum, that's not the point. It's really about the perception of color, which is psychology and not physics.

On a similar note, Elective Affinities[2] is a novel about human relationships that is inspired by chemistry. To this day even in English we refer to two persons as having "chemistry" together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_Affinities

If you enjoy Goethe, have a read of La Rochefoucauld's maxims which preceded Goethe by a century.

"Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them."

One need only grow old to become gentler in one’s judgments. I see no fault committed which I could not have committed myself.

:-)

> #33. Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.

E.g., smartphones

> Difficulties increase the nearer we come to our aim.

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

a great philosopher and poet he may have been, but it is hard to overstate his negative impact on colour theory. His magnum opus, Colour Theory, was an emotional rambling mess that took colour thinking away from Newton's empiricism. The first half of this book is never translated as it effectively constitutes a hate letter to Newton. the further tragedy is that it is clear that Goethe had a mostly mistaken understanding of what Newton was stating.