Quotes from work
The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Original title Das Märchen (German, 1795)

The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is a fairy tale by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published in 1795 in Friedrich Schiller's German magazine Die Horen . It concludes Goethe's novella rondo Conversations of German Emigrants . Das Märchen is regarded as the founding example of the genre of Kunstmärchen, or artistic fairy tale.


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“Love does not dominate, it cultivates. And that is more.”

Die Liebe herrscht nicht, aber sie bildet; und das ist mehr!
Das Märchen (1795), as translated by Hermann J. Weigand in Wisdom and Experience (1949); also translated elsewhere as The Fairy-Tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, and simply The Tale]
Variant translations:
Love does not rule; but it trains, and that is more.
As translated by Thomas Carlyle The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1832)
Love rules (and reigns) not, but it forms (builds and 'trains'); and that is more!
As quoted in "'Human Immortalities : The Old and the New" by Thaddeus Burr Wakeman, in The Open Court Vol. XX, No. 1 (January 1906), p. 104

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