Maxims and Reflections

Maxims and Reflections gathers several hundred short sayings that Goethe set down over the last decades of his life. They were not written as a single treatise. Goethe noted thoughts of his own and of others as he went, and the pieces were later collected and published, some only after his death. T. Bailey Saunders translated and selected them, with help from Thomas Huxley on the science and Frederic Leighton on the art, and arranged them under the headings Life and Character, Literature and Art, Science, and a closing essay on Nature.

The largest section, Life and Character, reads as practical wisdom about conduct. Goethe asks how a person comes to know himself and answers that it is never by thinking but by doing: attempt your duty, which is the claim of the day, and you learn at once what you are worth. He prizes proportion, self-control, and steady work, and he distrusts general ideas married to conceit, restless activity that ends in bankruptcy, and the habit of treating the means as the end.

The maxims on Literature and Art turn the same eye toward making and judging works. Goethe calls literature a fragment of fragments, since only a little of what happened was ever written and little of that survived. He locates the worth of a poem or speech not in language for its own sake but in the mind embodied in it, and he treats real originality as the power to say a thing as though it had never been said before, not the mere chase after novelty.

The Science section reads as a quiet method for inquiry. Goethe warns against passing too quickly from observation to conclusion and against theories that hurry to be rid of the phenomena they should explain. He counsels patience with what does not fit our previous ideas, since that is where a real problem shows itself, and he holds that one must first teach oneself before being taught by others.

The book closes with a short prose hymn to Nature, presented as aphorisms. Here Nature is a living whole that holds us in her clasp, plays at a vain show that is all-important to us, creates wants because she loves movement, and crowns herself with love. The tone is calm and reverent rather than systematic, fitting a collection whose aim throughout is to state broad truths of life, art, and the world in a manner admitting of little mistake.