Goethe : Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), poet, thinker, dramatist, novelist, & scientist.
... also with regard to Homer. You once spoke of Goethe as not being one of the world's absolutely supreme singers. Who are these, then? Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Kalidasa? And what about Aeschylus, Virgil and Milton? I suppose all the names you mention except Goethe can be included; or if you like you can put them all including Goethe in three rows—e.g.: 1st row Homer, Shakespeare... On Poets and Poetry Letters on Poetry and Art Great Poets of the World The World's Greatest Poets Goethe certainly goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find... movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and, one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice, his mind's choice among its many high and effulgent possibilities, rather than by the very necessity of his being. He ...
... here, for Goethe as a poet was a pantheist as well as a polytheist, and most pronouncedly so; but his mention of polytheism is enlightening, casting into relief the experience of all poetic imagination, since that imagination perceives feeling entities everywhere: Wordsworth with his "Presences of Nature" and "Souls of lonely places" was polytheistic no less than pantheistic. Goethe as the greatest... m'e dolce in questo mare. ... So In this immensity my thought is drowned And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea. (Bickersteth) A still greater figure on the Continent, Goethe, with all his urge towards Classicism in the years of his maturity, cannot escape the Romantic drive towards "things not easily expressible" and one of his best-known passages not only suggests the... that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, His mind was a thanksgiving to the powers T hat made him; it was blessedness and love! Another passage worth quoting from Goethe is the often-cited conclusion of Faust - words at once weighty and winged, in which several Romantic elements reach a fine spiritualisation through the idealistic in_tellect: Alles Vergangliche ...
... has just celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great force of light that was Goethe. We too remember him on the occasion, and will try to present in a few words, as we see it, the fundamental experience, the major Intuition that stirred this human soul, the lesson he brought to mankind. Goethe was a great poet. He showed how a language, perhaps least poetical by nature, can be moulded... great poetry. He made the German language sing, even as the sun's ray made the stone of Memnon sing when falling upon it. Goethe was a man of consummate culture. Truly and almost literally it could be said of him that nothing human he considered foreign to his inquiring mind. And Goethe was a man of great wisdom. His observation and judgment on things-no matter to whatever realm they belong-have an arresting... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2 Goethe A perfect face amid -barbarian faces, A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, Traveller with calm, inimitable paces, Critic with judgment absolute to all time, A complete strength when men were maimed and weak, German obscured the spirit of a Greek. SRI AUROBINDO ...
... less powerful hands. The result is that their poetry lacks that element of strict prolonged thought which gives an additional strength not merely to the great Greeks but to such writers as Racine and Goethe, whose strictly poetical power owes a great deal to the hard thought which has preceded composition and is indeed transcended in the poetry, but none the less is invisibly present and powerful. The... stimulates the failing blood with them and gives itself an illusion of some forceful sensation of living." Much Romanticism on the European Continent took this way and acquired the taint which led Goethe to brand it as "disease", and much in post-Romantic literature, whether avowing itself as Romantic or no, has gone thus "decadent" in various forms. The makers of the English Romantic Revival seldom... after-fruits to the modernism of today which is already becoming the modernism of yester-day" - the literature which stretches in France from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo and takes on its way Goethe, Schiller and Heine in Germany and covers in England Burns and Byron and the five names that stand out in the annals of the second phase of Romanticism and give to it not only, as the others do, its ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 Tagore the Unique IT is no hyperbole to say that Tagore is to Bengali literature what Shakespeare is to English, Goethe to German, Tolstoy to Russian, or Dante to Italian and, to go into the remoter past, what Virgil was to Latin and Homer to Greek or, in our country, what Kalidasa was to ancient Sanskrit. Each of these... a language and a literature that are not so immature but have already attained development and elegance, a creative vibhuti has brought about a second type of-transformation. Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe and Kalidasa did a work of this category. It cannot be said that English was undeveloped or quite rustic before Shakespeare, although the image of the grandly real, something truly familiar and intimate... with them. But just as Shakespeare may be said to have led the English language across the border or as Tolstoy made the Russian language join hands with the wide world or as Virgil and Goethe imparted a fresh life and bloom, a fuller awakening of the soul of poetry, to Latin and to German, so too is Tagore the paramount and versatile poetic genius of Bengal who made the Bengali language ...
... always with sureness, lightness, pellucid clarity and seeming finality. Here are a few lines, as it were carelessly dashed off, and yet they succeed in weighing Goethe against Shakespeare with an admirable percipience: Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means... movement nowhere came near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice, his mind's choice among its many high and effulgent possibilities, rather than by the very necessity of his being. He ...
... Browning on, 33-34; member of Indian Majlis and 'Lotus & Dagger', 34,37,183,281; 'Riding Test', 36ff; rejection from ICS, 37; appointment in Baroda, 37; songs to Myrtilla, 38ff, 71; on Parnell, 42; on Goethe, 42; at Apollo Bunder, 46, 64, 281, 385; at Naini Tal, 47, 66; learning Bengali & Sanskrit, 50; as Professor, 52ff; on Oxford & Cambridge, 52,53; on the "cultured Bengali", 55; A. B. dark, on, 55;... material things and waste, 601; on need for food and sleep, 600-2; on susupti state, 602; on role of 'hostile' forces, 602ff; on predestination, 602-3; letters to disciples on literature, 604ff; on Goethe and Shakespeare, 605, 606; on Valmiki & Vyasa, Homer & Shakespeare, 605; on Donne's poetry, 606; on psycho-analysis, 607; "four Aurobindos", 607-8; question-answer duet, 608-9; The Future... 763 Ghose, Rash Behari, 225,226, 263-64,267, 270,292, 295 Ghoshal, Saraladevi (Chaudhurani), 62, 266, 282,287,530 Gladstone, W. E., 259 God, 157 Goethe, 43, 658 Gokak, V. K., 690 Gokhale, G. K., 206,216,225,227,264,267, 296, 341 ff, 349, 390 Gooch, G. P., 713 Gossain (Goswami), Narendranath, 320ff, 323-24, 325,334 ...
... as also in others, Savitri challenges comparison with another great poetic masterpiece, Goethe's Faust, 122 which was years a-growing. Sri Aurobindo greatly admired Goethe and once wrote to a disciple: Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English Poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means... It will be clear, then, that the Faustian consciousness as presented by Goethe is verily an expanding and an evolving consciousness that tries to comprehend all ranges and gradation of human life; and it even extends, says Ronald Peacock, "to human experience over many centuries, since Goethe includes later in his play a deep vista of ancient culture and a sense of historical evolution... knew his Faust even as he knew the Commedia intimately, and he might even have seen—as Kuno Fischer and others have—resemblances between the two poems. In the earliest version dating from 1773, Goethe seems to have laid the stress on the heroine, Gretchen, while Faust was no more than the Faust of the old legend. It was almost twenty-five years later that—perhaps under the influence of Schiller—the ...
... consciousness from which the writing took place. Nor was Sri Aurobindo growing and maturing only as Goethe did during the composition of the second part of Faust; he was moving from plane to plane of Yoga. Not alone the ideas and the emotions were undergoing a change and reaching to ripeness as with Goethe: the very stuff of consciousness was turning increasingly from human to superhuman. Savitri was ... When we speak of Savitri we speak of a unique adventure in poetic creation. From a certain standpoint the only parallel to its development is the second part of Goethe's Faust. Goethe kept it with him for several decades, adding to it, revising it, making it run along with the growth of his own mind, and the last touch was given just a few days before his death. Here the parallel... comprehensive mystical portrait in all literature. To lead from darkness into light, from ignorance of God to knowledge of Him is the work assigned by many poets to woman. There is the praise by Goethe of the Eternal Feminine calling us onward and upward. And there is Dante's music about the santo riso, the saintly smile, of Beatrice which guided him from the sins of the flesh to the soul's ecstasy ...
... consciousness from which the writing took place. Nor was Sri Aurobindo growing and maturing only as Goethe did during the composition of the second part of Faust; he was moving from plane to plane of Yoga. Not alone the ideas and the emotions were undergoing a change and reaching to ripeness as with Goethe: the very stuff of consciousness was turning increasingly from human to superhuman. Savitri was... sensitive reader. When we speak of Savitri we speak of a unique adventure in poetic creation. From a certain standpoint the only parallel to its development is the second part of Goethe's Faust. Goethe kept it with him for several decades, adding to it, revising it, making it run along with the growth of his own mind, and the last touch was given just a few days before his death. Here the parallel... comprehensive mystical portrait in all literature. To lead from darkness into light, from ignorance of God to knowledge of Him is the work assigned by many poets to woman. There is the praise by Goethe of the Eternal Feminine calling us onward and upward. And there is Dante's music about the santo riso, the saintly smile, of Beatrice which guided him from the sins of the flesh to the soul's ecstasy ...
... nothing any more..." I am reminded of Sophocles who said on his eightieth birthday: "At last I am free of passion." The case was quite different with Hugo and Goethe. Around eighty Hugo was still a Page 162 skirt-chaser, and Goethe at that age had his last heart-flutter over a girl of eighteen although he had also the glorious intuition, half Sufi half Tantric, with which the second part ...
... number of its adherents. This was a popular movement in the real sense of the word. It found much of its justification in the enduring appraisal of the literature of the great romanticists Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and others. A supposedly glorious past, the communication with that past in the sanctuaries of nature and at the sites of the prehistoric monuments, a contact with the deepest individual... kind make Michael Burleigh quip that Germany was “going boldly into the future in search of an imaginary past”. 470 Volker Mauersberger, narrating the surrender to the Nazis of Weimar – as the town of Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche a symbol of German culture – quotes a historian who said that the völkisch movement, culminating in Nazism, was “the reconstruction of a past which was resplendently gilded ...
... drama - as notable an achievement as having penned Antigone or CEdipus Tyrannus. Goethe at the same age put the finishing touch to his Faust, the last lines of the great chorus with which it ends. In English they would read: The Eternal Feminine Is leading us upward. Around this time I believe Goethe had also his last affaire du cceur, falling in love with a girl in her late teens ...
... of Kālidāsa's Sakuntala is well-known. Goethe says: Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms and the fruits of its decline, And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed? Wouldst thou the heaven and earth in one sole name combine, I name thee 0 Śakuntala, and all at once is said. When we remember that Goethe himself was the greatest poet of Germany ...
... Summons us on even as Helena saves him. But this Helena is a sad-sweet romantic Psyche, tantalizing, never peace-giving (Goethe ever remained a romantic, never achieving the classic harmony) while Savitri, the cosmic force, is the pure divine. Goethe of his century had a sense of the need of resolving the conflict; but he could not. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri we find the conflict... subtlety of language and effective genius." But there is a touch which is mostly wanting, the touch of the absolute, the intensely inspired or revealing inevitability that is Sri Aurobindo's. " Goethe might have gone much deeper than Shakespeare, sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even;" but he never saw the light that Sri Aurobindo had seen, nor reached ...
... The translations from Goethe are excellent. You are certainly quite right in varying the answers in N 0 3; even in the German there is some monotony felt in the form,—a monotony, I would suggest, Shakespeare would have avoided. By the way, what is the meaning of "aus unseren Stall" in the poem "of lighter vein?" I could not quite equate it with your rendering. Goethe certainly goes much deeper... movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and, one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice rather than by the very necessity of his being. He wrote his poetry gs he did everything else with a great skill and effective ...
... SATYENDRA: Napoleon of course wanted the federation to be under France. SRI AUROBINDO: Under himself. SATYENDRA: He was France. PURANI: Even the Germans favoured the idea. Goethe welcomed it. SRI AUROBINDO: Goethe was not a patriot. He said that the Germans were barbarians and would always be barbarians. PURANI: Kant also did not have much sympathy with Prussia. He was a professor in Prussia... was a liberal. PURANI: The Christians tried to make out that Kant disproved the existence of God. SRI AUROBINDO: No, on the contrary, he tried to prove the possibility of the existence of God. Goethe was a cosmopolitan. When he was asked to express hatred against France, he said that he owed most of his culture to France. PURANI: Frederick the Great had a deep respect for France. He tried to ...
... in Greek and Latin in the examination for the Indian Civil Service.] He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester and studied for himself Italian and German sufficiently to read Dante and Goethe in the original tongue." I have left the detail about the Tripos and the record Page 36 marks, though I do not find these trifles in place here; the note would read much better... interested in them not for their own sakes but for their value to his inner self-development, psychic, religious, ethical or other. Are Tolstoi and Gandhi examples of introverts? Or in another field Goethe? Or does it mean one who cares for external things only as they concern his own ego? But that I suppose 'would include 999,999 men out of every million. What are external things? Russell is a ...
... him down, others making him soar, as Goethe expressed once with his rare power of imagery. "And when I think that I'm sitting on my hack and riding to the station I am in duty bound for, all of a sudden the mare under me will turn into a creature with uncontrollable desires and wings and run right away from me." But few people can be as conscious as Goethe of "this multitudinousness in human p ...
... love Come true on earth' —but she, alas, proved subtle whom no romance could move. She smiled on him as Frau von Stein once smiled on Goethe: did not she Invite the Poet? — but then "Oh no, not too close," said she warningly! Only, while Goethe had for his flame to pay in poems, not in gold: This modern 'Pickwick' gave her with his 'love-sick' heart his cash untold. Page 177 ...
... salient constituting characters. They make up that brilliant and confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished literature, stretching from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo and taking on its way Goethe, Schiller and Heine, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley, which forms a hasty transition from the Renascence and its after-fruits to the modernism of today which is already becoming the modernism... this artistic and intellectual effort. A wide, calm and impartial interest in all subjects for the sake of art and a poetically intellectual satisfaction,—this poise had already been anticipated by Goethe,—is the atmosphere which it attempts to create around it. There is here a certain imaginative reflection of the contemporary scientific, historic and critical interest in man, in his past and present ...
... impress its own colour and shape on the mind,—we have to suppose, of course, that, as the modern intellect has generally held, objects exist in themselves and not in our own consciousness of them. Goethe definitely framed this theory of literary creation when he laid it down that the ideal of art and poetry was to be beautifully objective. With the exception of some of the first initiators and until... creation where the isolation is not possible, we find quite an opposite phenomenon, the subjective personality of the poet asserting itself to a far greater extent than in former ages of humanity. Goethe himself, in spite of his theory, could not escape from this tendency; his work, as he himself recognised, is always an act of reflection of the subjective changes of his personality, a history of the ...
... ns, which he wanted to have omitted, was tacked on rather awkwardly as a closing parenthesis. In a typescript of the text that was submitted to him, Sri Aurobindo emended "to study Goethe and Dante" to "to read Goethe and Dante". Incomplete Life Sketches. These pieces are from Sri Aurobindo's manuscripts of the 1920s. The circumstances of their writing are not known. Incomplete Life ...
... fact of physical death appears but a slight episode, or perhaps a shadowy myth, along the radiant orb of immortality. Can we forget the beautiful description of this memorable experience as given by Goethe in "The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul" in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship: "During many sleepless nights, especially, I had some feelings so remarkable that I cannot describe them clearly... of Conquering It", in Bulletin of Physical Education, Vol. VI, No. 1, p. 65. 3 See H. Carrington and J. R. Meader, Death, pp. 170-72. Page 343 This citation from Goethe reminds us of the memorable words of Sri Krishna in the Bhagavadgita: "Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible ...
... too is partial. PURANI : Abercrombie says that although Goethe has range his hero Faust begins as a character and ends as an idea. SRI AUROBINDO: That is not quite correct. Faust is character throughout the first part of Goethe's poem. Only in the second part does he become an idea. And the two parts are really two separate books. Goethe wrote the second part in his old age. It is entirely different ...
... transformism could be discerned 5. Ivo Hollhuber, Philosopher C'est Apprendre à ê tre Homme. Page 5 even in the eighteenth century in the writings of Buffon in France, Goethe in Germany and Erasmus Darwin in England, these could not prevail against the then current mood of intellectual Europe. It is Lamarck, the disciple of Buffon, who was the incontestable founder of the... half a year: it was a duel between the transformist doctrine and the doctrine of the fixity of species. The whole of the scientific world of the epoch reverberated with the echoes of these polemics. Goethe, then of the ripe old age of eighty-one, took the keenest interest in this battle of ideas and, in fact, dedicated to this debate his last work completed in 1832 soon before his death. But, alas, ...
... true on earth' — but she, alas, proved subtle whom no romance could move. She smiled on him as Frau von Stein once smiled on Goethe: did not she invite the Poet? - but then 'Oh no, not too close,' said she warningly! Only, while Goethe had for his flame to pay in poems, not in gold: This modern 'Pickwick' gave her with his 'love-sick' heart his cash untold ...
... Poetry (New York, 1919). The Principles of Poetry (New York, 1904). Gilson, Etienne. Dante the Philosopher, translated by David Moore (Sheed & Ward, London, 1952). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust, (Bonn's Series, Bell, London, 1919). Gore, Charles. 'Be Philosophy of the Good Life (John Murray, London, 1930). Graves, Robert. The White Goddess:... Santayana, George. Essays in Literary Criticism, Selected and edited by Irving Singer (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1956). Three Philosophical Poets : Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1935). Sarma, D.S. Studies in the Renaissance of Hinduism in the 19 th and 20 th centuries (Benares Hindu University, Benares, 1944). ...
... s admiration for Whitman, 387; Sri Aurobindo compared to Kazantzakis, 404-405; Sri Aurobindo compared to Dante,414-415, 417-420; Sri Aurobindo's early narrative poems, 420-424; Sri Aurobindo on Goethe,425; Sri Aurobindo's views compared with Goethe's, 425-427; Sri Aurobindo's visionary certainty, 436; Sri Aurobindo's sonnets,440-443; discussion of Sri Aurobindo on the philosophy of Savitri, ... Ghose, Benoy Bhushan 6-7 Ghose, Krishnadhan 6 Ghose, Lotika 53 Ghose, Manomohan 6-7 Ghose, Swarnalata 6 Gide, Andre 267-268 Giradoux, Jean 268 Goethe 40,273,377,425-427 Gokhale,G.K.10 Gupta, Nolini Kanta 20 Gurdjieff34,35 Haas, William S. 307,316 Hakim, Khalifa A 33 Hardy, Thomas 251,377 ...
... metallic finish of this portrait of Goethe: A perfect face amid barbarian faces, A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, Traveller with calm, inimitable paces, Critic with judgment absolute to all time, A complete strength when men were maimed and weak, German obscured the spirit of a Greek. 56 Admirer of Parnell and Goethe, lover of Greece and Ireland, young ...
... gala jouney, as though all limits were unacceptable to her, including those of death: "Frankly speaking, at seventy-six I scarcely like old age, life is still beautiful to me . . . and I proclaim with Goethe, 'Beyond the tombs, forward!' " From such seed came Mother. Page 25 2 Mathilde and Barine Mathilde, Mira Ismalun's second daughter, was born in Alexandria... the tax collector, "Look here, these are my chickens!" True, Mathilde was simple, but she was by no means uncultured. The young lady from Alexandria was as well read as her mother who admired Goethe, and considerably more intellectual. Life was seen by her as a set of mathematical theorems to be perpetually and rigorously demonstrated: it had to be exact and tend imperturbably towards some ideal ...
... end of this eventful journey, as if all limits seemed unacceptable to her, including those of death: "Truly speaking, at seventy-six, I scarcely like old age; I still find life beautiful... and, with Goethe, I exclaim, 'Beyond the tombs, forward!’” There was a seed there. Mirra among the Materialists With Mother, it is another rhythm, profound, vast, silent —but intrepid. For intrepidity was... Things were pretty rough at boulevard Haussmann. Not that Mathilde lacked culture; on the contrary, that young Alexandrian lady was very cultured, at least as much as the grandmother who admired Goethe, and she was considerably more intellectual, but she viewed life as a mathematical theorem to be constantly and rigorously proven. Life had to be exact and tend imperturbably toward some ideal asymptote ...
... afterwards of selecting & bringing out from oneself at will impressions received from others. This supreme power, European scholars agree, is wanting in Hindu dramatic literature. A mere poet like Goethe may extend unstinted & even superlative praise to a Shacountala but the wiser critical & scholarly mind passes a far less favourable verdict; there is much art in Hindu poetry, it is said, but no genius; ...
... themselves back, suppress the force in their personality in order to put it wholly into their work. Of such were Shakespeare, Washington, Victor Emmanuel. There are others like Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, who are as obviously superhuman in their personality as in the work they accomplish. Napoleon was the greatest in practical capacity of all moderns. In capacity, though not in character, he resembles ...
... mediaeval and of modern Europe. He was a brilliant scholar in Greek and Latin. He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester and studied for himself German and Italian sufficiently to read Goethe and Dante in the original tongues. (He passed the Tripos in Cambridge in the first division and obtained record marks in Greek and Latin in the examination for the Indian Civil Service.) [ Sri Aurobindo's ...
... World War II , 217 , 224, 229 -230 Gangoly, O. C., 115-116 Germans , 239 Germany, 112 in World War II , 213, 23 6, 237(fn) Ghose, Barindra Kumar , 13, 17, 47, 150 Gita , see under Bhagavat Gila Goethe , 77 , 88 Gounod ajar, 203 Go swami, Bijoy, 76 government, 217, 236 controls, 213 systems of, 165, 172 , 177,178 ,214,215 Greece (ancient), 86 , 119, 168 , 183 ,217 Greek (language), 109 Greeks ...
... such a process not for India, but for all humanity has been recognised by leading European thinkers. It was what Carlyle meant when he spoke of swallowing all formulas. It was the process by which Goethe helped to reinvigorate European thinking. But ... Europe has for some time ceased to produce original thinkers, though it still produces original mechanicians____ China, Japan and the Musulman states ...
... experience. A poet may have a religious creed or subscribe to a system of philosophy or take rank himself like Lucretius or certain Indian poets as a considerable philosophical thinker or succeed like Goethe as a scientist as well as a poetic creator, but the moment he begins to argue out his system intellectually in verse or puts a dressed-up science straight into metre or else inflicts like Wordsworth ...
... not for their own sake but for their value to the soul's self-development, its psychic, religious, ethical or other self-expression? Are Tolstoy and Gandhi examples of introverts? Or in another field Goethe? Or does it mean one who cares for external things only as they touch his own mind or else concern his own ego? But that I suppose would include 999,999 men out of every million. What are external ...
... the divinity sought were a separate godhead within oneself and not the one Divine, or if one sought God for oneself alone, then indeed the result might be a grandiose egoism, the Olympian egoism of a Goethe or the Titanic egoism imagined by Nietzsche, or it might be the isolated self-knowledge or asceticism of the ivory tower or the Stylites pillar. But he who sees God in all, will serve freely God in ...
... action, was not in Germany's statesmen and soldiers—for the most part poor enough types of men—but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great thinker and poet Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres ...
... more than any other literary influence to form the modern turn of the European mind and its mode of expression; the shortlived outbursts of creative power in the Spain of Calderón and the Germany of Goethe exercised an immediate, a strong, though not an enduring influence; the newly created Russian literature has been, though more subtly, among the most intense of recent cultural forces. But if we leave ...
... The errors of great poets in judging their contemporaries are personal freaks—they are failures in intuition due to the mind's temporary movements getting in the way of the intuition. The errors of Goethe and Bankim were only an overestimation of a genius or a talent that was new and therefore attractive at the time. Richardson's Pamela was after all the beginning of modern fiction. As I have said ...
... which Mendonҫa and the Times reviewer find to be badly lacking in it. It is true that they have differed in the poems they have chosen; Andrews cited particularly the Rishi and the epigram on Goethe as proof of his description of me as a great poet; an English critic, Richardson, singled out Urvasie and Love and Death and the more romantic poems, but thought that some of my later work was ...
... modern languages, he has been intimately acquainted Page 73 with French from his early Manchester years. Nor are Italian and German any strangers: he rubs shoulders with Dante and Goethe in the original. The speech of Calderon too is on more than nodding terms with him: I am told that once inspiration seized him with force enough to pour through him a couple of hundred lines of brilliant ...
... word Paradiso derives from the Persian Pairidaeza.) Milton too would have written of the war between God and Satan, angels and devils, though the story of the Garden of Eden might have differed. Goethe also would have thought of his Mephistophiles the Devil tempting Faust. We are thinking of might-have-beens. As things are, ho more than a lakh of people survive to follow in the most literal sense ...
... Page 151 and, whatever genius may be expended upon it, this kind cannot remain long alive. That is the secret of the failure of modem romanticism in Germany and France. In Germany, Goethe and Heine alone got away from this falsity and were able to use this strain in its proper way as one enriching chord serving the complex harmonic purpose of the intelligence; the rest of German literary ...
... e but also ridiculous in many things. For instance, he refused to attend de Quincy's marriage to the country girl who had borne him several children. In his later years he could not endure to read Goethe; he found in Goethe's works "a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality" which he described as "utterly revolting". He wrote a whole series of sonnets praising capital punishment. Several traits of his character ...
... as for those who preach inaction, I am not of the opinion of those weaklings." Na me matam tasya durbalasya . But the action he holds up as an example, is the action of the great Gods, even as Goethe speaks of the action of the great natural forces, disinterested, unwearying, self-poised in bliss, not inert with the tamas, not fretful with the rajas, not limited even by the sattwic ahankara—action ...
... such a process not for India, but for all humanity has been recognised by leading European thinkers. It was what Carlyle meant when he spoke of swallowing all formulas. It was the process by which Goethe helped to reinvigorate European thinking. But in Europe the stream is running dry before it has reached its sea. Europe has for some time ceased to produce original thinkers, though it still produces ...
... oned labouring lies And clamps to earth the spirit's high desire. These lines may be compared to some of Goethe's in Faust, Englished by G. Lowes Dickinson and Susan Stawell in their Goethe and Faust published several years after In the Moonlight. The translation runs: Twin brethren dwell within me, twins of strife, And either fights to free him from the other; One grips ...
... forces — Shaktis — only they could counter and douse this fire. One bore him and brought him up, the other married and took him over. (Against the superiority of another there is no remedy but love. — Goethe) Not so fortunate (as the horse and cow) was a Sahib boss who chose to ignore or could not correctly gauge Pantulu. Neither his rank nor colour was enough to save him. Pantulu did not run him through ...
... and declamatory elements in Intimations of Immortality though the two poems are otherwise admirable. As the four people from whom he learnt habits, methods and ruling ideas, Arnold mentions Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte Beuve and Newman. In his essay on Wordsworth Arnold gives a leading place to the latter's moral interpretation but is unable to explain the salient features of his style and ...
... rebirth, and only one or two of the most relevant points should be borne in mind. Notable Westerners have believed in reincarnation: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Gauguin, Strindberg, Mondriaan, Jung, H. G. Wells. It was the great composer and director Gustave ...
... was no longer a future for the German people. He belongs to the great Beings of Light who always arise among the Germans when they find themselves in the deepest physical, mental and spiritual need. Goethe was such a being in the realm of the mind and Bismarck in the political field, but the Führer is such a being in all fields: political, cultural and military. He is predestined by the karma of Germanhood ...
... death, there was the SS man. Doing evil made him feel stronger, more superhuman. Hans Hüftig had been the former commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp – on the Ettersberg near Weimar, where Goethe once walked. To an interviewer he told in 1986, from his comfortable retirement: “Today it seems so cruel, inhuman and immoral. It did not seem immoral to me then: I knew very well what I was going ...
... secondary school in London. Along with the normal curriculum, by following which he made rapid progress in Latin, Greek and French, he also taught himself Italian, German and Spanish to read Dante, Goethe and Cervantes in the original. As to English literature, he showed much interest in the Elizabethan theatre and for the great romantic poetry, particularly that of Keats, Shelley and Byron. He was ...
... And the Transcendent kept its secrecy." (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri,p.271) Prometheus and Ganymede The human spirit has ever oscillated between two extreme and opposite ideals. Goethe has well characterised them as, on one side, the ideal symbolised by Prometheus, a passion for 'Vernunft und Wissenschaft des Menschen allerh ö chste Kraft' ('the Reason and Knowledge of man the ...
... mean that one will never arrive..." I come now to a dear friend of mine about whom it is a joy to write. I warn the reader, however, that I lay no claim to be above bias. A saying of the great Goethe always raised an echo in my mind: "Aufrichtig zu zein kann ich versprechen, unparteiish zu zein, aber nicht." 1 do not mean that I like, consciously, to say things in a friend's favour which my ...
... especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, medieval and modern Europe. ‘He also taught himself Italian, German and Spanish in order to read Dante, Goethe and Calderon in the original tongues. A boy with so ambitious a programme could not rightly be accused of laziness.’ 11 The Foundation Scholarship awarded him by his headmaster must have come in ...
... supra-cosmic Infinite who emanates or looses-forth the world out of His own being in whatever form He chooses. Of course Eckhart is not the sole thinker possible for comparison, Leibnitz, Hegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, Steiner are others who in various ways can provide a hold. Nor is Page 89 Heidegger so far astray as you believe from the Aurobindonian line. His Being and Time, an early ...
... lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable in time-span to Goethe's - and his too ...
... But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a slightly lower level, along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton - just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the elite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute ...
... 39,60,182,185,258 evolution 65, 247 G Gita 207 Gnosis 51 Goddess of Inspiration 345 God, Europe vs. Asia 30 God of Love 24 God-realisation 5,315 Gods 253 Goethe 1,22,57,205 Gokak, Dr. V.K. 333 golden lid 307 Gray 234 H Hartz, Richard 356,360,362 higher and lower hemispheres 306 Hiranyagarbha 99 Homer 132,186,205,213,258 ...
... which Mendonca and the Times reviewer find to be badly lacking in it. It is true that they have differed in the poems they have chosen; Andrews cited particularly the Rishi and the epigram on Goethe as proof of his description of me as a great poet; an English critic, Richardson, singled out Urvasie and Love and Death and the more romantic poems, but thought that some of my later work was ...
... inch a 'political being,' unmatched by anyone of her sex in modern history, and yet at the same time a thorough woman and a great lady." We may apply to her the magnanimous principle laid down by Goethe: her faults were an infection from her time, but her virtues were her own. Scenes of Russia at the time of Catherine II: common wooden houses (Original drawing by an English traveller) ...
... transformed education, elevated the morals of France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoi, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century ...
... was precisely what stirred the opposing Forces to action. They were to keep man distracted, lure him from the good path into evil ways, change him, not into a god but a demon, a titan, a ghoul. (Goethe once had presented this picture.) That is how man got his notion of the super-race, and the notion took concrete shape among a particular people and some particular individuals. That is what lay ...
... nce of this movement the most outstanding philosopher poet is of course Dante, the Dante of Paradiso, a philosopher in the mediaeval manner and to the extent a lesser poet, according to some. Goethe is another, almost in the grand modern manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo ...
... antagonistic—in temperament and character and outlook. The Western Germany is the true Germany, the Germany of light and culture, the Germany that produced the great musicians, poets and idealists, Goethe and Heine and Wagner and Beethoven. The other Germany represents the dark shadow. It is Prussia and Prussianised Germany. This Germany originally belonged to the bleak, wild, savage, barbarous East ...
... releases the inmost potency of that literature, and who marks at the same time the height to which its creative genius has attained or perhaps can ever attain. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe and Camoens, Firdausi in Persian and Kalidasa in classical Sanskrit, are such names – numina, each being the presiding deity, the godhead born full-armed out of the poetic consciousness of the ...
... changing the conditions of our reactions, mental or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot ...
... DR. MANILAL: Mahavira used to fast for more than six months at a time. But I cannot fast at all. When not hungry, I can live on very little milk. SRI AUROBINDO: Americans fast for forty days. Goethe used to take only one meal a day, but that meal was very big. DR. MANILAL: How shall I get rid of this pain in the gall bladder, Sir? NIRODBARAN: Concentrate on your Self and forget the pain ...
... 196 Esau, 121 Europe, 297, 383 FAR EAST, THE, 54 Faust, 397 France, 78, 141 GANGES, THE, 85n George VI, 117 Gita, the, 173, 198,208-9,248, 267,272, 284, 297, 337, 345 Goethe, 244n HAMLET, 387 Hapsburgs, the, 338 Helen, 399 Himalayas, the, 224 Hitler, 338 Hohenzollerns, the, 338 407 Page 407 ILA, 189 Ilion, 399 ...
... Sunday school.) Shelley and "Prometheus Unbound," the French poets, Homer, Aristophanes, and soon all of European thought – for he quickly came to master enough German and Italian to read Dante and Goethe in the original – peopled a solitude of which he has said nothing. He never sought to form relationships, while Manmohan, the second brother, roamed through London in the company of his friend Oscar ...
... our age, but of all ages. His all-embracing, crystal clear and profound philosophy is assuredly a contribution to human thought, vision and progress which ranks with that of Plato, Kant, Bergson or Goethe... the findings of Sri Aurobindo which we have no means of verifying at our level of experience actually supply all the consistency which strikes us in the explanation given by Sri Aurobindo ...
... "get out” in order to catch God somewhere above, all the way up there, in that golden Future inside a tomb. And again, we seem to hear Mira Ismalun, madcap that she was, who had so well understood Goethe: "Beyond the tombs, forward!” But were we to abolish death, what would be left of the religions? And of their salvations? Whereas now that we come to the bottom of the pit, now that we despair of ever ...
... I" Tilak was borne off by his followers. Then Sri Aurobindo quietly left the pavilion. He had stood there calm and rocklike amid the whirlwind. Page 421 And Nevinson. "Like Goethe at the battle of Val my, I could have said, 'Today marks the beginning of a new era, and you can say that you were present at it.'" The Mahratta shoe acted like a lighted matchstick thrown on ...
... 'This can't be Bengali!'" One of Sri Aurobindo's interests was in "learning languages" for which he had a natural aptitude. He learnt German and Italian so well by himself that he could study Goethe and Dante in the original. In Baroda he picked up Gujarati "as I had to read the Maharaja's files." It was also in Baroda that Sri Aurobindo for the most part learnt Bengali for himself; before engaging ...
... seldom perfectly sane and strong in all its parts. So much did these elements form the basis of Coleridge's own temperament that he could not perhaps imagine a genius in which they were wanting. Yet Goethe, Dante & Sophocles show that the very highest genius can exist without them. But none of the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in femineity as Vyasa, none dominates ...
... Baronet and orthodox, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet and pioneer of free-thought, but learns in a little while that Percy Shelley had a grandfather, and marvels no longer. Could we trace the descent of Goethe and Shakespeare we should find the root of the Italian in the one and the Celt in the other—but the world did not then and Page 82 does not now appreciate the value of genealogies to philosophy ...
... Indeed the literary ability may be said to contain all the others, and the more so when it takes the form of criticism or of any art, such as the novelist's, which proceeds principally from criticism. Goethe in Germany, Shakespeare, Fielding and Matthew Arnold in England are notable instances. Even where practical abilities seem wanting, a close study will often reveal their existence rusting in a lumber-room ...
... Homeric, the English alexandrine does not render the French; terza rima in Latinised Saxon sounds entirely different from the noble movement of the Divina Commedia, the stiff German blank verse of Goethe & Schiller is not the golden Shakespearian harmony. It is not only that there are mechanical differences, a strongly accentuated language hopelessly varying from those which distribute accent evenly ...
... irritabile vatum; nor does he square any better with the popular idea that melancholy, eccentricity and disease are necessary concomitants of genius. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Goethe, the really great poets, were men of high sanity—except perhaps in the eyes of those to whom originality & strong character are in themselves madness. But to arrive at this harmony requires time ...
... European enlightenment to which we bow our heads. For these Augustus created Europe, Charlemagne refounded civilisation, Louis XIV regulated society, Napoleon systematised the French Revolution. For these Goethe thought, Shakespeare imagined and created, St. Francis loved, Christ was crucified. What a Page 545 bankruptcy! What a beggary of things that were rich and noble! Europe boasts of her ...
... Songs to Myrtilla Collected Poems Goethe A perfect face amid barbarian faces, A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, Traveller with calm, inimitable paces, Critic with judgment absolute to all time, A complete strength when men were maimed and weak, German obscured the spirit of a Greek. ...
... This, the title-poem of the collection, is headed in the manuscript "Sweet is the night". O Coïl, Coïl. Circa 1890–98. The coïl is the koyel or Indian cuckoo. Goethe . Circa 1890–98. The Lost Deliverer . Circa 1890–98. In the manuscript and the Baroda edition, this epigram is entitled "Ferdinand Lassalle". Lassalle (1825 64), a German socialist ...
... Fire King and the Messenger 673 Flame-Wind 574 Form 625 God 218 Page 734 God to thy greatness 675 The Godhead 607 A God's Labour 534 Goethe 16 The Golden Light 605 The Greater Plan 606 Greek Epigram 685 The Guest 612 Hail to the fallen 676 Hell and Heaven 538 Here in the green of the forest ...
... hand on the mould & sustains it, so that it does not break at all, nor is flawed; or if there is a disturbance, it is slight and negligible. Such an element there was in Caesar, in Shakespeare, in Goethe. Sometimes also a force appears to which we can no longer apply the description of genius without being hopelessly inadequate in our terminology. Then those who have eyes to see, bow down and confess ...
... a reservation. All this as well as his later sex-transcendence without any loss of true passion demonstrates the subtle stuff of which he was made: he was no gross animal as so many great men -like Goethe and Victor Hugo - are in spite of their lofty intellects. But in one point Ellis fails in subtlety of spirit. The failure is associated with his having other women than his wife to minister to ...
... lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable in time-span to Goethe's — and his too ...
... chapter in human History. Other blacknesses threaten to Overshadow or even engulf mankind, but they too will end as that nightmare has ended." "Guru", I pursued again. "I cry like the gasping Goethe: 'more light'! For I miss it today as never before. I have heard so much about the Divine Grace and seen so little of it so far! But I am dead sure you'll silence me by saying that in a brighter mood ...
... their own sakes' but for their value to the soul's self-development, its psychic, religious, ethical or other self-expression? Are Tolstoy and Gandhi examples of introverts? Or, in another field — Goethe? Or does it mean one who cares for external things only as they touch his own mind or else concern his ego? But that I suppose would include 999,999 men out of every million. "What are external ...
... to the touches of outward things." But neither my ardour nor my arguments availed: he proved quite opaque. In fact he did remind me of Madame de Stael who, to quote from Schiller's famous letter to Goethe: "insists on explaining everything, understanding everything, measuring everything. She admits of no darkness, nothing incommensurable: where her torch throws no light Here nothing can exist.... She ...
... world is commencing, an interpretation by the will, not by knowledge. “It is only in an upsurge of feeling and in action that one comes into contact with the true being of the world. I don’t like Goethe, but I am inclined to overlook a lot of him for one thing he has said: ‘In the beginning was the deed’. Only the man of action becomes conscious of the true being of the world. Man abuses his intellect ...
... French and mathematics. His reports show that these subjects provided him with no difficulty, and he found time to study on the side Italian, German and Spanish in order to be able to read Dante, Goethe and Calderón in the original. At that time he led a life of poverty because his father, for unknown reasons, practically stopped sending money for him and his second brother, while most of their scanty ...
... been so much disfigured in its objective action, was not in Germany’s statesman and soldiers … but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great poet and thinker Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres ...
... errors of great poets in judging their contemporaries are personal freaks—that is to say, failures in intuition duet the mind's temporary movements getting in the way of the intuition. The errors of Goethe and Bankim were only an overestimation of a genius or a talent that was new and there- fore attractive at the time. Richardson's Pamela was after all the beginning of modern fiction. I don't know ...
... chapter in human history. Other blacknesses threaten to over-shadow or even engulf mankind, but they too will end as that nightmare has ended." "Guru," I pursued again, "I cry like the gasping Goethe: 'more light!' For I miss it today as never before. I have heard so much about the Divine Grace and seen so little of it so far! But I know you will effectively silence me by saying that in a brighter ...
... " Among the latter, Sri Aurobindo makes three rows: First row - Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. Second row - Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton. Third row - Goethe. In Sri Aurobindo's view, Dante and Kalidasa would rank beside those in the first row except that they do not have enough of "a kind of elemental demiurgic power". Each of the others "has ...
... after August, 1891, when Bowden joined the firm of Ward, Lock, and Co.), "unannotated edition, edited with a critical memoir by William Michael Rossetti". Among these notes, "two detect echoes from Goethe and Spenser, several remark metrical irregularities or faulty rhymes..." Three in all record variant readings. One of them, apropos of The magnetic Lady to her Patient , has textual variations pencilled ...
... things feared from the supposed action of so-called "inauspicious stars" (Shakespeare's phrase) assume a con-creteness and a power to affect you. Carlyle once wrote: "Close your Byron and open your Goethe." He meant the putting aside of the sheer vitalistic urge and the romantic melancholy, and the developing of a mental detachment and an uplifted serenity which would see life as a whole -something ...
... poetry. But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a slightly lower level, along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton — just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the e1ite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute ...
... lamp burning in the shrine of inner perceptions — and must create whenever his daemon prompts him. This done, his surplus time and energy he may devote to the betterment of social conditions, as Goethe used to. He served society, but only during lulls in his creative inspiration... A man's duty is not done if he thinks only of his contemporaries - his neighbours: he has to take count of his ...
... diverse branches of the former. Homer certainly does not start a train of imaginative argument on life's why and whence and whither, as Lucretius often does, Dante in several places, Milton not seldom, Goethe at times, Shelley on occasion, Wordsworth repeatedly, Lascelles Abercrombie in a notable measure, Hardy to a certain extent, Sri Aurobindo in a good part of his middle-period work. Neither does Homer ...
... called (in German Aufklärung, in French les Lumières ). German Romanticism presented the world with some of the greatest novelists, poets, philosophers and musicians: the literary men Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Heine, Hölderlin; the philosophers Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel, all of them having to define themselves against Kant, paragon of the Aufklärung; and musicians of the stature of Mozart ...
... irrational not only in matters of politics but also in matters sociological, ideological and religious. The times were out of joint, not only in Germany, but all the same very much so in the land of Goethe and Kant. Hitler, driven by the power of his “obsessions”, was an intriguing figure of the kind which fascinated the masses. And the more his fame spread, the more he was attacked by the enemy on the ...
... Turn of the Century”. “German utopianism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost always meant a return to pre-Christian, pagan spirituality in some form”, declares Richard Noll. “Goethe exemplified this trend in the romantic movement by suggesting replacing the fairy tale of Christ-worship with sun worship. The romantic revival of the Greek gods in Germany also led to utopian visions ...
... Jews, was also elected a member of the Thuringian parliament at Weimar. In 1928 he was the chief organizer of the first National-Socialist “Day of the Party” where the Nazis, under the stony gaze of Goethe and Schiller, showed their intentions uninhibitedly and the savage way they were to go about them. 501 It was on this “Day of the Party” that Hitler, after the debacle of the November Putsch in 1923 ...
... there is another additional element that is connected with the phenomenon of Light well known and common to mystic experience. That inner Light of which the mystics speak is not a metaphor, as when Goethe called for more light in his last moments; it presents itself as a very positive illumination actually seen and felt by the inner sense. The brightness of the still and clear mind is a reflection of ...
... "perfect hexameter". 22 July 1932 A Selection of Short Poems 1) Transformation 2) Bird of Fire √ 3) Rose of God √ 4) Who? 5) Revelation 6) To the Sea 7) God 8) Invitation 9) Epigram on Goethe 10) Renewal 11) Descent 12) Estelle (I find this is not a translation) Page 360 I think these may be sent for his own selection of six. No translation or extracts from dramas or long ...
... n, an intellectual pose and, whatever genius may be expended upon it, this kind cannot remain long alive. That is the secret of the failure of modern romanticism in Germany and France. In Germany, Goethe and Heine alone got away from this falsity and were able to use this strain in its proper way as one enriching chord serving the complex harmonic purpose of the intelligence; the rest of German literary ...
... imaginations. But I think I have said enough to show that anyone wanting the truth about Sri Aurobindo would do well to avoid any reliance on Ramchandra's narrative. It can be described in the phrase of Goethe "Poetic fictions and truths" for the element of truth is small and that of poetic fiction stupendous. It is like the mass of ale to the modicum of bread in Falstaff's tavern bill. In fact it is almost ...
... in Greek and Latin in the examination for the Indian Civil Service |. He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester and studied for himself Italian and German sufficiently to read Dante and Goethe in the original tongue." 2 I have left the detail about the Tripos and the record marks, though I do not find these trifles in place here; the note would read much better with the omission of ...
... enlightenment to which we bow our heads. For these Augustus created Europe, Charlemagne re founded civilisation, Louis XIV regulated society. Napoleon systematised the French Revolution. For these Goethe thought, Shakespeare imagined and created, St. Francis loved, Christ was crucified. What a bankruptcy! What a beggary of things that were rich and noble! Europe boasts of her science and its marvels ...
... lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittendy and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable in time-span to Goethe's—and his too was ...
... a mistake in artistic method. But behind it was also a psychological flaw in the poet. Hugo had a lot of self-conceit. To a youth who said to him that he had been reading Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe, Hugo said sharply: "Mais a quoi bon? Je les resume tous." 1 The colossal confidence with which he thought he summed up all the poetic giants of the past and with which he went on pronouncing like ...
... spoke of the feminity of genius he had in mind certain features of temperament which whether justly or not, are usually thought to count for more in the feminine mould than in the masculine.... Yet Goethe, Dante and Sophocles show that the very highest genius can exist without them. But none of the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in feminity as Vyasa, none dominates ...
... the lamp burning in the shrine of inner perceptions - and must create whenever his daemon prompts him. This done, his surplus time and energy he may devote to the betterment of social conditions, as Goethe used to. He served society, but only during lulls in his creative inspiration... A man's duty is not done if he thinks only of his contemporaries - his neighbours: he has to take count of his duties ...
... ever in the attractive unconsciousness of the tomb." 1 The process of death has served the interests not merely of the individuals as individuals but of the species as well. Was it not Goethe who declared: "Death is Nature's expert contrivance to get plenty of life"? Indeed, the deathlessness of the constitutive individuals would prevent others of the same species from being alive at ...
... name for this unity. Ekatmanubhuti is the source of the leader's power and influence. Empowering leadership is a conscious process of building capacity in an organization. As the German poet Goethe once said: "If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be." ...
... antagonistic-in temperament and character and outlook. The Western Germany is the true Germany, the Germany of light and culture, the Germany that produced the great musicians, poets and idealists, Goethe and Heine and Wagner and Beethoven. The other Germany represents the dark shadow. It is Prussia and Prussianised Germany. This Germany originally belonged to the bleak, wild, savage, barbarous East ...
... Gibbon, 238 -The Decline & Fall of the Roman EmPire, 238 Gide, Andre, 353-4 Gita, the, 27, 57,68, 83, 161, 163,188-9, 276, 280, 328, 340, 363, 369, 371, 381, 394 Goethe, 88, 197 Goncourts, 145 Gondwanaland, 223 Govind Singh, 396 Gray, Thomas, 115n Greece, 16, 25, 119, 159, 205-6, 211,2H, 238-41, 244-6 HADAMARD, PROF ...
... 'vision' over other senses (compare the French saying: 'voir, c'est comprendre', 'To see is to understand') has led man to identify knowledge with light and sight in all spheres of comprehension. Thus, Goethe in his last moments calls for light and more light, and the ancient Upanishadic utterance epitomises for ever the ardent prayer of all seekers after the Truth: 'tamaso m ā jyotirgamaya' 5 , 'lead ...
... believed that his home was in Ionia in Asia. Among the front ranking poets of the world we could include Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Kalidas, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Goethe. From the point of view of essential force and beauty, Homer and Shakespeare stand above all the rest, although Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharta is greater in his range than Homer in the Page ...
... GANDHARVAS,26 Gargi, 5-6 Germany, 253 Ghcse, Prof. Manmohan, 230, 234 Gita, the, 7, 17, 24, 51, 53, 58, 73, 114, 117-18, 12In., 145, 149, 166, 180, 235, 239n., 274 Gloucester, 171-3 Goethe, 71, 88, 135-6, 138-9 Graves, Robert, 180, 182,218 -New Poems 1962, l80n -"The Ambrosia of Dionysus & Semele", 180n., 183n Greece, 73, 193-4, 196n., 281 Gupta, Atul, 234 ...
... changing the conditions of our reactions, mental . or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot ...
... was precisely what stirred the opposing Forces to action. They were to keep man distracted, lure him from the good path into evil ways, change him, not into a god but into a demon, a titan, a ghoul. (Goethe once had presented this picture.) That is how man got his notion of Page 487 the super-race, and the notion took concrete shape among a particular people and some particular individuals ...
... childhood, of the mission of his life. This foreknowledge is not something very rare; it has been a usual, if rather extraordinary, phenomenon in the lives of the supreme prophets, poets and pioneers. Goethe had it, Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda had it. The second point indicates his Yogic identification with Mother India in whom he had realised the Divine Mother. He was well advanced in Yoga at ...
... was already at ease in them and did not think it necessary to labour over them any longer." Sri Aurobindo mastered French and learnt enough of Italian and German to be able to read Dante and Goethe in the original. His studies in the Classics, English and French literatures, and the entire history of Europe was not only extensive, but extraordinarily deep, ample evidence of which is found ...
... Calcutta, 1923 The 1923 edition contains twenty-one poems, all except five written between 1890 and 1892 while Sri Aurobindo was a student at Cambridge: "Songs to Myrtilla", ''0 Coil, Coil", "Goethe", "The Lost Deliverer", "Charles Page 404 Stewart Pamell", "Hie Jacet", "Lines on Ireland", "On a Satyr and Sleeping Love" (translation), "A Rose of Women" (translation) ...
... East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy. 123. Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Third Series, pp. 305-6. It is also interesting to recall Sri Aurobindo's youthful tribute to Goethe: A perfect face amid barbarian faces, A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, Traveller with calm, inimitable paces, Critic with judgment absolute to all time, A complete ...
... pacing to the southern sea... 86 Few certainly, though not perhaps quite pale or weak, these early pieces have a disarming sensibility even when they are derivative, and the memorial pieces—to Goethe, Bankim, Madhusudan, Rajnarain, Parnell—really seem to rise to the occasion. In his later years he wrote numerous lyrics, but more and more these came to be charged with philosophical or spiritual ...
... section on "The Spirit of Synthesis" in The Eternal Wisdom , Paul Richard cited some revealing affirmations: Wouldst thou penetrate the infinite? Advance, then, on all sides of the finite. (Goethe) There is one height of truth and there are those who approach from all sides, as many sides as there are radii in a circle, that is to say, by routes of an infinite variety. Let us work, then ...
... © Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1981. The Mind Of The Cells is the English translation © Institut de Recherches ÉVOLUTIVES, Paris, 1999, 2002. Beyond the tombs, forward! Goethe A Passport to Where? On precisely the fifteenth day after my twentieth birthday, at the comer of an avenue in a French city, my life changed abruptly. To the sound of screeching ...
... task. Even if we put together all the geniuses of the world, we could not conceive of Plato writing Phaedras, The Republic, The Laws and God knows what else at the same time, nor can we imagine Goethe managing Faust, Wilhelm Meister .. . and whatever else in one go. Furthermore, Sri Aurobindo was also writing poetry and drama simultaneously, which He did not publish in the Arya, not to mention ...
... objective, visible meaning behind which an invisible, profounder meaning is hidden"; the invisible is crystallised into the visible symbol, which as it were 'contains' the invisible infinite; or, in Goethe's words (as quoted by Jacobi), "symbolism transforms the phenomenon into idea and the idea into image; in the image the idea remains infinitely effective and unattainable and even when expressed in ...
... founded on translations can only deal with the substance,—and even that in most translations of Indian work is only the dead substance with the whole breath of life gone out of it. Still even here Goethe's well-known epigram on the Shakuntala will be enough by itself to show me that all Indian writing is not of a barbarous inferiority to European creation. And perhaps we may find a scholar here and ...
... epic in European language has been written. The general feeling among the critics is that at present epic manner and epic content are trying for a divorce. The last effort, on a large scale, was Goethe's Faust, which also falls far short of the epic height and grandeur. Similarly, Shelley' Revolt of Islam, Keats' s incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they too do not ...
... Temps Perdu, Ulysses and perhaps even Doctor Zhivago, though written in prose, make a total impact that is not unlike the impact of epics on us. And what is one to say about a phenomenon like Goethe's Faust or Hardy's The Dynasts} The Cantos of Ezra Pound sets a similar problem: is it an epic, too, an epic still in progress? And we have, above all, Nikos Kazantzakis' colossal epic The ...
... or abundant. In Germany, so rich in music, in philosophy, in science, the great poetic word has burst out rarely: one brief and strong morning time illumined by the calm, large and steady blaze of Goethe's genius and the wandering fire of Heine, afterwards a long unlighted stillness. In the North here or there a solitary genius, Ibsen, Strindberg. Holland, another Teutonic country which developed an ...
... to all time", we may well express our fundamental experience of the Mother's Birth-Centenary with the phrases forming the grand finale of that poem of the modern spirit's ceaseless searching, Goethe's Faust: All things that pass Are symbols alone; Here into Fullness Each failure is grown; Here the Untellable Crowns all endeavour, The Eternal ...
... also heard of "Victoria regina", Queen Victoria, and then we may think of some Queen and the renovation of dolour or sorrow. Perhaps German would provide more opaque lines of enchanting rhythm — say, Goethe's Verweile doch, du bist so schon, or else his Das Ewig weibliche Zieht uns hinan. Even here the "doch" of the first quotation may suggest the abbreviation of "doctor": "doc." But ...
... imperious personalities—a world where nobody would ultimately be left but pharaohs and sultans, as if we were not already swamped with tyrants—or even to evolve ever more intelligent geniuses, super-Goethes or super-Beethovens—a world ultimately so overflowing with literature and music that we might be saturated or bored to death, as if this formidable human ascent of suffering and chaos and conflict ...
... Death's desire, his prayer too is fulfilled. He faces Savitri but this is not the Savitri against whom he fought. Whose is this voice ? 1 We are reminded here of a parallelism in Goethe's conception of the role of Satan (the Negative Principle) in human affairs. Satan is not merely a destroying devil, he is a constructive angel. For it is he Who must goad and tease ...
... Death. .² Death's desire, his prayer too is fulfilled. He faces Savitri but this is not the Savitri against whom he fought. Whose is this voice? ¹ We are reminded here of a parallelism in Goethe's conception of the role of Satan (the Negative Principle) in human affairs. Satan is not merely a destroying devil, he is a constructive angel. For it is he Who must goad and tease And toil to ...
... and you need not go back to the old turbulent life: dwell here both of you and enjoy eternal bliss. But Savitri answered firm and moveless: * We are reminded here of a parallelism in Goethe's conception of the role of Satan (the Negative Principle) in human affairs. Satan is not merely a destroying devil, he is a constructive angel. For it is he Who must good and lease ...
... mission too is fulfilled. 1 So a last cry, the cry of a desperate dying Death, pierces the universe and throws the final challenge to Savitri: 1 We are reminded here of a parallelism in Goethe's conception of the role of Satan (the Negative Principle) in human affairs. Satan is not merely a destorying devil, he is a constructive angel. For it is he Who must goad and tease ...
... human claimant to immortality, Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit's force, 14. Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 29, p. 586. * We are reminded here of a parallelism in Goethe's conception of the role of Satan (the Negative Principle) in human affairs. Satan is not merely a destroying devil, he is a constructive angel. For it is he Who must goad and lease ...
... fifty years a-growing, not in bulk alone, but even more through its conquest of ever-rising heights of Consciousness, — a phenomenon in poetic creation that has been compared by K. D. Sethna with Goethe's Faust. 1 When the whole epic of nearly 24,000 lines was at last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but a few — and more and more as the months and years passed... time. The completion of a poem or its first publication marks no more than the beginning of its unpredictable life. Dante' sDivina Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, not to mention works like the Gita: have we yet come to the end of our 'understanding' of these constituents of the human heritage? This applies even more, perhaps, to a cosmic epic like ...
... ready to leave this evening: only he will have to dismiss me personally, remember! For I can take no orders from you." I was desperate, obviously, and although in my extremity I still repeated Goethe's couplet about the good man being saved at the eleventh hour, I did not see how I was to be spared the Page 216 consequences of my own gratuitous insolence. So I brooded in my abysmal ...
... fifty years a-growing, not in bulk alone, but even more through its conquest of ever rising heights of Consciousness, - a phenomenon in poetic creation that has been compared by K.D. Sethna with Goethe's Faust. 14 When the whole epic of nearly 24,000 lines was at last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but a few - and more and more as the months and years passed... completion of a poem or its first publication marks no more than the beginning of its unpredictable life. Dante's Commedia, Page 683 Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's epic, Goethe's Faust, not to mention works like the Gita: have we yet come to the end of our 'understanding' of these constituents of the human heritage? This applies even more, perhaps, to a cosmic epic like ...
... Aurobindo : What is there the cause and what is the effect ? One man strikes the blow and the other dies, so one is the cause and the other is the effect ! Disciple : He has also read Goethe's Faust and finds that Page 37 the heroine (Henrietta) could not find peace until she took to the spinning-wheel. Sri Aurobindo : My God ! (turning to a Disciple ) Do ...
... not been successful. The feeling among the critics is that epic-manner and epic-content are trying for a divorce at present. The last effort, on a sufficiently large scale on the continent, was Goethe's Faust which, however, falls far short of the epic height and grandeur. Efforts in the English language were more or less of the nature of exercises and experiments lacking vitality and inspiration ...
... far, not been successful. The feeling among the critics is that epic-manner and epic-content are trying for a divorce at present. The last effort, on a sufficiently large scale on the continent, was Goethe's Faust which, however, falls far short of the epic height and grandeur. Efforts in the English language were more or less of the nature of exercises and experiments lacking vitality and inspiration ...
... the flesh is weak'? This foreigner expressed his understanding of it thus: 'The whisky is good but the meat is rotten.' " 99 28. Foreign words suggesting a different sense: Example: Goethe's original German line "Verweile dock, du bist so scbon" means "Linger a while, thou art so fair." To someone not knowing German the expression "doch" by its characteristic sound may suggest the ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.