Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives--from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the... villagers of Chichacestenango--with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to- date scripts for actors on the tourists' stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Wh...oever takes offence at this combination, and whoever does not consider a revolution important unless it is blatant and palpable, has not yet risen to the lofty and broad vantage point of the history of mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Goethe's whole education and life were those of the artist. He lacks the unconsciousness of the poet. In his autobiography he desc...ribes accurately the life of the author of Wilhelm Meister. For as there is in that book, mingled with a rare and serene wisdom, a certain pettiness or exaggeration of trifles, wisdom applied to produce a constrained and partial and merely well-bred man,--a magnifying of the theatre till life itself is turned into a stage, for which it is our duty to study our parts well, and conduct with propriety and precision,--so in the autobiography, the fault of his education is, so to speak, its merely artistic completeness. Nature is hindered, though she prevails at last in making an unusually catholic impression on the boy. It is the life of a city boy ... defrauded of much which the savage boy enjoys.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the e...ffect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Prayer is the fair and radiant daughter of all the human virtues, the arch connecting heaven and earth, the sweet companion that i...s alike the lion and the dove; and prayer will give you the key of heaven. As pure and as bold as innocence, as strong as all things are that are entire and single, this fair and invincible queen rests on the material world; she has taken possession of it; for, like the sun, she casts about it a sphere of light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Often, while contemplating works of art, not in their easily perceptible materiality, in the too-clear hieroglyphs of their contou...rs or the obvious meaning of their subject, but in the soul with which they are endowed, in the atmospheric impression that they convey, in the spiritual light or darkness which they pour into our souls, I have felt entering into me a kind of vision of the childhood of their creators. Some little sorrow, some small pleasure of the child, inordinately inflated by an exquisite sensibility, become later on in the adult man, even without his knowing it, the basis of a work of art.... Genius is nothing but childhood clearly formulated, newly endowed with virile and powerful means of self-expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow... Jones in 1929.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »