On taking people as they should be

    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

A song the angels sing

It's the Summer Solstice tonight, here in the Northern Hemisphere, and that makes me think of these lines from Goethe in praise of the Sun:

Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Starke,
Wenn keiner sie ergrunden mag;
Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.

Your shining gives the angels power,
Yet none can understand your ways;
Incomprehensible Creation
Stuns as it did on the first day.

"Song of the Archangels"
from Faust, Part One, lines 247-50 (1787-1808)
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Translated by Frank Beck

• Goethe's birthplace in Frankfurt
• Goethe House in Weimar
• A new Goethe biography by Rudiger Safranski
• VIDEO: David Constantine and Karen Leeder on translating "Faust"
• VIDEO: Trailer for Philipp Stoelzl's "Young Goethe in Love"

Portrait of Goethe by Angelika Kaufmann, 1787

(Goethe National Museum, Weimar; detail)