I'd like to add a short and serene poem which Goethe
"probably wrote [...] onto the wall of a wooden gamekeeper lodge on top of the Kickelhahn mountain where he [...] spent the night." [1]
Wandrers Nachtlied ("Wanderer's Nightsong")
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
O’er all the hilltops
Is quiet now,
In all the treetops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait, soon like these
Thou too shalt rest. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
It's hard to overstate the importance of Goethe to German culture and literature. He was a brilliant man with a lively mind. One nonfiction work of his I quite enjoyed is his Theory of Colours[1]. While many dismiss it as "wrong" because it isn't a correct physical theory of wavelengths and spectrum, that's not the point. It's really about the perception of color, which is psychology and not physics.
On a similar note, Elective Affinities[2] is a novel about human relationships that is inspired by chemistry. To this day even in English we refer to two persons as having "chemistry" together.
Jung said something similar. Couldn't find the quote but it's something like:
The point at which we cannot accept someone else. When their actions are so terrible that we think of them as a monster, different than ourselves. Marks the point that we haven't explored and come to know ourselves.
We can't imagine doing something so bad because we don't really know what we're capable of.
> Difficulties increase the nearer we come to our aim.
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.
a great philosopher and poet he may have been, but it is hard to overstate his negative impact on colour theory. His magnum opus, Colour Theory, was an emotional rambling mess that took colour thinking away from Newton's empiricism. The first half of this book is never translated as it effectively constitutes a hate letter to Newton. the further tragedy is that it is clear that Goethe had a mostly mistaken understanding of what Newton was stating.
Wandrers Nachtlied ("Wanderer's Nightsong")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer%27s_Nightsong