Essays On Goethe Quotes

“If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Essays On Goethe

“Faust has spent his youth and manhood,
not as others do, in the sunny crowded paths of profit,
or among the rosy bowers of pleasure, but darkly and alone in the search of Truth; is it fit that Truth
should now hide herself, and his sleepless pilgrimage
towards Knowledge and Vision end in the pale
shadow of Doubt? To his dream of a glorious higher
happiness, all earthly happiness has been sacrificed;
friendship, love, the social rewards of ambition were
cheerfully cast aside, for his eye and his heart were
bent on a region of clear and supreme good ; and now,
in its stead, he finds isolation, silence, and despair.
What solace remains ? Virtue once promised to be
her own reward ; but because she does not pay him in
the current coin of worldly enjoyment, he reckons her
too a delusion; and, like Brutus, reproaches as a
shadow what he once worshipped as a substance.
Whither shall he now tend 1 For his loadstars have
gone out one by one ; and as the darkness fell, the
strong steady wind has changed into a fierce and
aimless tornado. Faust calls himself a monster,
" without object, yet without rest.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Essays On Goethe