"If a poet would work politically, he..." - Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.
More by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“Secrecy has many advantages, for when you tell someone the purpose of any object right away, they often think there is nothing to it.”
“Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight.”
“The nude is the perfect expression of freedom. Freedom to be.”
More on Art
“Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.”
“Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.”
“There is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.”
More on Politics
“I think that Donald Trump is coming to this office with fewer set hard-and-fast policy prescriptions than a lot of other presidents might be arriving with.”
“In every community there are little knots of fantastic extremists who loudly proclaim that they are striving for righteousness, and who, in reality, do their feeble best for unrighteousness. Just as the upright politician should hold in peculiar scorn the man who makes the name of politician a reproach and a shame, so the genuine reformer should realize that the cause he champions is especially jeopardized by the mock reformer who does what he can to make reform a laughingstock among decent men.”
“In Missouri, it's a 50/50 state, so I'm kind of used to half the state being mad at me.”