Maxim 441, trans. Stopp
“
There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before — you've just got to try to think it all over again.
• Variant translation: All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What It Means
This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before — you've just got to try to think it all over again.
• Variant translation: All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again." in the context of "Maxim 441, trans. Stopp" to mean that wisdom is timeless.
Source: Wikiquote: "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe" (Quotes, Maxims and Reflections (1833): Full text in German. Translation by Elisabeth Stopp (Penguin, 1998) follows Max Hecker's canonical German edition (1907). Bailey Saunders' selection, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe (1893), translates 590 of Goethe's 1413 maxims.)
The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
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About Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,