Maxims and Reflections

"Everything clever has already been thought; the difficulty is to think it once more." Goethe wrote that line, and more than a thousand others like it, on scraps and in notebooks across a working lifetime, never meaning to publish a book of them: some were slipped into the back of a novel as the papers of a fictional woman, the rest were found among his things after he died. What survives is not a system but a mind still in motion, turning from cloud formations and the behaviour of light to Shakespeare, to the failings of German critics, to the flat terror of "nothing is more frightful than ignorance in action." Many will slide past unremarked, and then one stops you cold because it has your own life inside it, and you look up to find that you are the thing being read.