If some people hadn't felt obliged to repeat what is untrue simply because they had at one point maintained it, they would have turned into quite different people.
• Maxim 586, trans. Stopp
• Maxim 586, trans. Stopp
“
Wenn mancher sich nicht verpflichtet fühlte, das Unwahre zu wiederholen, weil er’s einmal gefügt hat, fo wären es ganz andere Leute geworden.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What It Means
This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Wenn mancher sich nicht verpflichtet fühlte, das Unwahre zu wiederholen, weil er’s einmal gefügt hat, fo wären es ganz andere Leute geworden." in the context of "If some people hadn't felt obliged to repeat what is untrue simply because they had at one point maintained it, they would have turned into quite different people.
• Maxim 586, 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,