Maxims of Goethe 1

Occasionally, someone asks why this blog includes selections that are not directly related to Stoic philosophy, and one message even suggested such selections were "wasted filler". 

The reason is that an original intent of the blog was to offer truths from many different sources, which all happened to share in a common Wisdom Tradition, of which Stoicism is but one part. 

The "classical" part means universal and timeless. Stoicism is a starting point, not the end point. 

Accordingly, you won't find any Nietzsche or Sartre here. But you will find sources from Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, the Bible, and all sorts of whacky things in between. 

And you may well find something from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 

Without first being raised on the sayings of Goethe by his family, that odd Liam Milburn would probably never have been open to learning about the likes of Seneca, Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius!  

Was Goethe a romantic, a classicist, or a modernist? Does it matter? Is he speaking the truth? Then to heck with the "-isms". Only academics and poseurs care for the labels; real people care for the content. 

Leave it behind if it doesn't work for you, but look carefully before you take such a leap. 

There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again. 

IMAGE: Karl Joseph Stieler, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (at age 79) (1828)