Goethe's Maxims and Reflections

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Living the Life Series · 67 pages

Goethe's Maxims and Reflections in T. Bailey Saunders's translation, sixty-seven pages with the translator's preface and a full contents page. It is the longest document in this batch.

The maxims are arranged in four divisions, each subdivided, and the arrangement tells a reader how to use the file. The translator's preface comes first in three parts. Life and Character is much the largest section, running to seven numbered subsections across some twenty-six pages, and holds the aphorisms on conduct, self-knowledge and dealing with other people that the Living the Life series exists to gather. Literature and Art follows, then Science, then Nature — the last two reflecting Goethe's own working life as much as his reading. Because each maxim is complete in a sentence or two and nothing depends on what precedes it, the file is built for opening at any point rather than reading through, in the same way as the Pythagorean sentences, the Tamil proverbs and the Hitopadesha selections held elsewhere in this section. Setting a German poet's aphorisms beside those collections is itself part of the section's method: the same practical wisdom is presented as arriving independently in traditions with no contact with one another.

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