What does Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mean?

Definitions for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
jo·han·n wolf·gang von goethe

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Princeton's WordNet

  1. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethenoun

    German poet and novelist and dramatist who lived in Weimar (1749-1832)

Wikipedia

  1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. He is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language, his work having a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day.Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November 1775 following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, in 1782. Goethe was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe became a member of the Duke's privy council (1776–1785), sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace.Goethe's first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy. In 1791 he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in 1805. During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust. His conversations and various shared undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have come to be collectively termed Weimar Classicism. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written, while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six "representative men" in his work of the same name (along with Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare). Goethe's comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, notably Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (1836). His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler.

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Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers

  1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    Germany’s greatest poet, born Frankfort-on-Main, 28 Aug. 1749. He records that early in his seventh year (1 Nov. 1758) the great Lisbon earthquake filled his mind with religious doubt. Before he was nine he could write several languages. Educated at home until sixteen, he then went to Leipsic University. At Strasburg he became acquainted with Herder, who directed his attention to Shakespeare. He took the degree of doctor in 1771, and in the same year composed his drama “Goetz von Berlichingen.” He went to Wetzlar, where he wrote Sorrows of Werther, 1774, which at once made him famous. He was invited to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar and loaded with honors, becoming the centre of a galaxy of distinguished men. Here he brought out the works of Schiller and his own dramas, of which Faust is the greatest. His chief prose work is Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. His works are voluminous. He declared himself “decidedly non-Christian,” and said his objects of hate were “the cross and bugs.” He was averse to abstractions and refused to recognise a Deity distinct from the world. In philosophy he followed Spinoza, and he disliked and discountenanced the popular creed. Writing to Lavater in 1772 he said: “You look upon the gospel as it stands as the divinest truth: but even a voice from heaven would not convince me that water burns and fire quenches, that a woman conceives without a man, and that a dead man can rise again. To you, nothing is more beautiful than the Gospel; to me, a thousand written pages of ancient and modern inspired men are equally beautiful.” Goethe was opposed to asceticism, and Pfleiderer admits “stood in opposition to Christianity not merely on points of theological form, but to a certain extent on points of substance too.” Goethe devoted much attention to science, and he attempted to explain the metamorphosis of plants on evolutionary principles in 1790. Died 22 March, 1832.

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Numerology

  1. Chaldean Numerology

    The numerical value of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Chaldean Numerology is: 8

  2. Pythagorean Numerology

    The numerical value of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Pythagorean Numerology is: 6

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