Faust – JW von Goethe (1831)

Second Part, Act II, pg. 111

Thales

…For small means only unto small deeds tend,

But great means make the small man great

Act III, pg. 179

Chorus

Who peace and unity

Scorneth, for war’s array,

With impunity

Slays his hope of a better day.

Faust – JW von Goethe (1831)

Second Part – Act I – pg. 25

Megaera:

…For, let them once be married,

I go to work and can, in every case,

The fairest bliss by wilful whims displace.

Man has his various moods, the hours are varied,

And, holding the Desired that once did charm him,

Each for the More-desired, a yearning fool,

Leaves the best fortune, use has rendered cool:

He flies the sun, and seeks the frost to warm him.

Faust – JW von Goethe (1831)

Scene 1, pg. 22

Wagner:

“Ah, God! but Art is long,

And Life, alas! is fleeting.”

pg. 23

“Most zealously I seek for erudition:

Much do I know – but to know all is my ambition.”

Faust (solus):

pg. 24-25

“If hopeful Fancy once, in daring flight,

Her longings to the Infinite expanded,

Yet now a narrow space contents her quite,

Since Time’s wild wave so many a fortune stranded.”

…

“Shall here a thousand volumes teach me only

That men, self-tortured, everywhere must bleed, –

And here and there one happy man sits lonely?”

…

Second Part, Act I

pg. 14-15

Mephistopheles:

How closely linked are Luck and Merit,

Doth never to these fools occur:

Had they the Philosopher’s Stone, I swear it,

The Stone would lack the Philosopher!

The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)

“I have been drunk more than once, my passions have always bordered on madness; I am not ashamed to confess it; I have learned in my own way that all extraordinary men who have done great and improbable things have ever been decried by the world as drunk or insane.”

Arrowsmith – Sinclair Lewis (1925)

Ch. 26 – p. 267

“To be a scientist — it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious — he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!

He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists — like these psycho-analysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.

He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless — so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors — and see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling how he loves everybody!

But once again always remember that not all the men who work at science are scientists. So few! The rest — secretaries, press-agents, camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf, there is only one t’ing — no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to protect you from Success. It is all I can do.”