Quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther at twenty-four and set off a European craze; he then spent nearly sixty years as a minister of state in Weimar, wrote a theory of colour he valued above his poetry, did serious work in botany and anatomy, and finished Faust shortly before dying at eighty-two. He is the central figure of German literature. A great deal of what circulates under his name in English — the couplet about boldness especially — he did not write.