Читать книгу Once A Grand Duke by Alexander Grand Duke of Russia - Alexander Mikhailovich - Страница 8

Someone has proposed the toast, “Our Memories.” Goethe knocked on the table and said: “I do not like these words. The toast seems to imply that we have forgotten and that some outer event recalls our memories to us. Those things which are great and beautiful never leave us; they become part of ourselves. It is not the past but the eternally new which our desires would have us seek. . . . The new is itself the creation of ever-growing elements of the past. True longing must always be productive and fashion a new and better self.”

ROMAIN ROLLAND: Goethe and Beethoven.