Goethe: "Every extraordinary person has a mission"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every extraordinary person has a particular mission which he is called upon to fulfill. When he has accomplished it, he is no longer needed on earth in the same form, and Providence uses him for something else...

Mozart died at thirty-six. Raphael at practically the same age. Byron was only a little older.

But each of them had accomplished his mission perfectly, and it was time for them to go so that others might still have something left to do in a world created to last a long while.

Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann.

Over every hill 

All is still; 

In no leaf of any tree 

Can you see 

The motion of a breath; 

Every bird has ceased its song. 

Wait; and thou too, ere long, 

Shall be quiet in death.

- Goethe, Wanderer's Nightsong, tr. Arthur Hugh Clough