Quotes from Elective Affinities

“Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they find to laugh at.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“Artists and artisans both demonstrate with perfect clarity that a person is least able to appropriate for himself those things which are most peculiarly his. His works leave him as birds do the best in which they were hatched.

In this respect an architect's fate is the strangest of all. How often he employs his whole intellect and warmth of feeling in the creation of rooms from which he must exclude himself. Royal halls owe their splendor to him, and he may not share in the enjoyment of their finest effects. In temples he draws the line between himself and the holy of holies; the steps he built to ceremonies that lift up the heady, he may no longer climb; just as the goldsmith worships only from afar the monstrance which he wrought in the fire and set with jewels. With the keys of the palace the architect hands over all it's comforts to the wealthy man, and has not the least part in them. Surely in this way art must little by little grow away from the artist, if the work, like a child provided for, no longer teaches back to touch its father.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“But there are times," said Charlotte, "when it is necessary and an act of friendship to write nothing rather than not to write.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“Fortunately a human being can comprehend only a certain degree of unhappiness; anything beyond it destroys him or leaves him cold. There are situations in which fear and hope become one and the same, cancel one another out, and lose themselves in a dark insensateness. How else could we know the people we love best to be in continual danger and yet go on with our daily lives as usual?”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“Oh, I envy you!" he cried. "You are still nourished by yesterday's alms, but yesterday's happiness no longer nourishes me.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“It is such an agreeable feeling to be busy with something one is only half-competent to do that nobody should criticize the dilettante for taking up an art he will never learn, or blame the artist who leaves the territory of his own art for the pleasure of trying himself in a neighbouring one.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“Even people who are entirely strange and indifferent to one another will exchange confidences if they live together for a while, and a certain intimacy is bound to develop.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“No one can walk beneath palm trees with impunity, and ideas are sure to change in a land where elephants and tigers are at home.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“So all in their different fashions pursued their daily lives, thoughtfully or not; everything seemed to be following is usual course, as is the way in monstrously strange circumstances when everything is at stake: we go on with our lives as though nothing were the matter.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“We are never content with portraits of people we know. For that reason I have always felt sorry for portrait painters. We rarely ask the impossible of anyone, but of them we do. They are required to get everybody's relationship with the subject, everybody's affection or dislike, into the picture; and not merely represent their own view of a person but what everybody else's might be too.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“How many new discoveries does not a person make when on some high point he ascends but a single story higher.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“Few people are capable of concerning themselves with the most recent past. Either the present holds us violently captive, or we lose ourselves in the distant past and strive with might and main to recall and restore what is irrevocably lost.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“O viață fără iubire, fără vecinătatea celui iubit nu e decât o comédie à tiroirs, o proastă comedie cu sertărașe. Le tragi afară unul după altul și le împingi iarăși la loc, trecând în grabă la celălalt. Tot ce se petrece, fie chiar bun și însemnat, abia dacă se înlănțuie. Trebuie pretutindeni s-o iei de la început și ai vrea pretutindeni să termini.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“Schönheit ist überall ein gar willkommener Gast.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“Wir haben nicht verschuldet, unglücklich zu werden; aber auch nicht verdient, zusammen glücklich zu sein.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“E s'abituava a disfarsi di tutto, per non aver più niente da perdere.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

“Amiamo tanto guardare al futuro perché desideriamo volgere a nostro favore, con desideri silenziosi, l'incertezza che in esso si muove.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Elective Affinities

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Popular quotes

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“Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ...

McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history.

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― David Halberstam, quote from The Best and the Brightest

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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