"Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done"
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Discipline is being sold here not as a moral virtue but as a practical technology: a way to convert time from something that happens to you into something you can bank. Goethe’s line has the brisk inevitability of an engineer’s diagram. “Devote each day” makes devotion less a feeling than an allocation decision, like budgeting money. The “object” stays intriguingly vague, which is the point: it could be a poem, a scientific experiment, a love affair, a life. By refusing to name it, he turns the reader into a co-author, forced to supply the ambition that the sentence will then hold you accountable to.
The subtext is gently tyrannical. “Then in time” implies compounding interest, the slow magic of accumulation. Goethe doesn’t promise inspiration; he promises arithmetic. You do the work, time does the rest. The payoff arrives not in some grand, cinematic breakthrough but in a quieter ritual: “every evening will find something done.” Evening is a daily audit, a reckoning that turns progress into a habit of self-respect. It’s also a prophylactic against the romantic myth of the artist who waits for lightning. Goethe, the writer who was also a statesman and a restless polymath, knew that output is less about being visited by genius than about building a life where genius has to show up to meet you.
Context matters: this comes from an era that was beginning to prize method, productivity, and self-fashioning alongside the old ideals of inspiration. The sentence works because it flatters and disciplines at once: it offers the consolation of “something done,” while quietly insisting that “nothing done” is, most days, your own choice.
The subtext is gently tyrannical. “Then in time” implies compounding interest, the slow magic of accumulation. Goethe doesn’t promise inspiration; he promises arithmetic. You do the work, time does the rest. The payoff arrives not in some grand, cinematic breakthrough but in a quieter ritual: “every evening will find something done.” Evening is a daily audit, a reckoning that turns progress into a habit of self-respect. It’s also a prophylactic against the romantic myth of the artist who waits for lightning. Goethe, the writer who was also a statesman and a restless polymath, knew that output is less about being visited by genius than about building a life where genius has to show up to meet you.
Context matters: this comes from an era that was beginning to prize method, productivity, and self-fashioning alongside the old ideals of inspiration. The sentence works because it flatters and disciplines at once: it offers the consolation of “something done,” while quietly insisting that “nothing done” is, most days, your own choice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
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