German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was born on this day in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany.

More than a century later, Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray carried these words into his own writing about commitment and adventure, helping Goethe’s call to begin boldly travel across generations.

One of the great masters of world literature, Goethe studied law at Leipzig and Strasbourg, but his genius reached far beyond literature. His interests embraced politics, botany, optics, geology, and meteorology.

“Once you have missed the first buttonhole,” Goethe said, “you'll never manage to button up.” And about fame: “The deed is everything, the glory is naught.”

His early novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), portrayed Werther, a sensitive young man driven to suicide. The work gained an instant following and became a defining work of Sturm und Drang (German for “Storm and Stress”).

For decades, Goethe worked on Faust, the story of a scholar who bargains with the devil in his restless search for knowledge, experience, and life’s meaning. The story evolved as Goethe himself grew older, and he completed the second part shortly before his death in 1832. In the end, Faust’s soul is redeemed.

“Love and desire,” Goethe wrote, “are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.”