linda fetch

The complete quote, which you see all over the place, is

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” — Goethe

Thrills the soul, doesn’t it? Well, it’s a great quote, and I agree with it, but it ain’t from Goethe. I read this on a calendar with inspirational quotes, and something about it just didn’t ring true. I’m no expert in Goethe, only having read Faust in translation, but it sounded a little new-agey for him.

(Oh yeah, I also read “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and know his poem “The Elf-King” but those hardly count as major literary works.)

So anyway; some obsessive person researched this quote in depth and there’s a great report on it at this link: http://german.about.com/library/blgermyth12.htm

Goethe is considered by Germans to be their Shakespeare. He obviously wrote a lot of excellent things, so there’s no need to attribute something to him that isn’t his.

This is reminiscent of the old “Desiderata” poem that you couldn’t get away from in the 70s. It showed up on posters in good head shops everywhere. However it was not “Found in old St. Paul’s Church, 1692” but rather was written by a poet in the 1920s.