"The Challenge of Renewal"
The Conduct Of Life (1951)
“A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.”
Maxim 1207, trans. Stopp
Variant translation: The greatest happiness for the thinking man is to have fathomed the fathomable, and to quietly revere the unfathomable.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 185
German writer, artist, and politician 1749–1832Related quotes
Attributed to Kauffman in: Jared Lobdell (2004) This Strange Illness: Alcholism and Bill W.. p.123
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 267.
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
Context: The manner of men's Hero-worship, verily it is the innermost fact of their existence, and determines all the rest,—at public hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else. Have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well; have sham-reverence, and what also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 488.
"No Worst, There Is None", lines 9 -15
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Narada Bhakti Sutras (2001)
Context: A million words cannot express what a glance can convey, and a million glances cannot express what a moment of silence can. A moment of silence conveys so much more than any other expression. Still, love is beyond silence too. You can describe silence to some extent, but that which is beyond silence cannot be expressed. You give, you hug... but still something remains unexpressed.