Most of the quotes I quote (yes) are so I can remember them to quote them later. This is something I first read and wrote down in 1987:

He is so exceedingly anxious to justify himself that if he thinks he has said anything too precipitate or too general or only half true, he never stops qualifying, modifying, and extenuating, until at last he appears to have said nothing at all.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” pg.45

I've known people like this. Sometimes I'm one of them.

Tags: Goethe, Books