Goethe Was Right

Goethe said, “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful implanted in the human soul.” Today, I came across an article, "Things Vital to the Honor of Human Life," that made me pause and renewed my sense of the beautiful in literature.

Here is the link to the arousing and arresting article in the NY Times by Sam Tanenhaus on the idea that a reader can extract the essence of a work of literature with (often) a singular quote against the notion of critic Samuel Johnson's that works of literature are like "architectural feats" which cannot be dichotomized without fundamentally losing the idea of the whole.

Perhaps more interesting than the article are the favorite passages listed by readers in the comments section.

Among my favorite passages:

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of violin or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?” - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” - Eugene O'Neill, 'Long Day's Journey Into Night'

“Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make language that will melt the stars.” - Flaubert, Madame Bovary