"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
"There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it."
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Source: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1853). “The Poems of Goethe”, p.380
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