Maxims and Reflections · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The most important matters of feeling as of reason, of experience as of reflection, should be treated of only by word of mouth. The spoken word at once dies if it is not kept alive by some other word following on it and suited to the hearer. Observe what happens in social converse. If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation. With the written word the case is still worse. No one cares to read anything to which he is not already to some extent accustomed: he demands the known and the familiar under an altered form. Still the written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect. Both what is reasonable and what is unreasonable have to undergo the like contradiction. Dialectic is the culture of the spirit of contradiction, which is given to man that he may learn to perceive the differences between things. With those who are really of like disposition with himself a man cannot long be at variance; he will always come to an agreement again. With those who are really of adverse disposition, he may in vain try to preserve harmony; he will always come to a separation again.
Opponents fancy they refute us when they repeat their own opinion and pay no attention to ours. People who contradict and dispute should now and then remember that not every mode of speech is intelligible to every one. Every man hears only what he understands. I am quite prepared to find that many a reader will disagree with me; but when he has a thing before him in black and white, he must let it stand. Another reader may perhaps take up the very same copy and agree with me. The truest liberality is appreciation. For the strenuous man the difficulty is to recognise the merits of elder contemporaries and not let himself be hindered by their defects. Some men think about the defects of their friends, and there is nothing to be gained by it. I have always paid attention to the merits of my enemies, and found it an advantage. There are many men who fancy they understand whatever they experience. The public must be treated like women: they must be told absolutely nothing but what they like to hear.
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