If we just take people as they are . . . we make them worse; but, if we treat them not as they are but as they should be, we help them to become what they can become.
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship: Book 8, chapter 4 (1796)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Translated by Eric A. Blackall and Victor Lange
(p. 326 in the 1995 Princeton University Press edition)
- Some memorable lines from "Faust"
- The Goethe National Museum in Weimar
- Goethe's birthplace in Frankfurt
- Rüdiger Safranski's new Goethe biography
- VIDEO: Trailer for "Young Goethe in Love"
1787 portrait of Goethe by Angelika Kauffmann
