Were the eye not of the sun, How could we behold the light? If God's might and ours were not as one, How could His work enchant our sight?

The eye doesn't see any shapes, it sees only what is differentiated through light and dark or through colors.

With little art, clear wit and sense Suggest their own delivery.

Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.

There is not a single outward mark of courtesy that does not have a deep moral basis.

What am I then...? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity and old age all have brought me their thoughts....their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.

Nothing is good for a nation but that which arises from its own core and its own general wants, without apish imitation of another.