Superstition is the poetry of life.

Taken at face value, the line suggests that superstition—though irrational from a scientific standpoint—functions in human life the way poetry does: it supplies imaginative patterns, symbolic meaning, and emotional resonance where strict reason offers none. Goethe often explored the tension between Enlightenment rationality and the persistent human need for myth, omen, and wonder; in that light, the remark can be read less as an endorsement of credulity than as an observation about psychology and culture. Superstitions can be “poetic” because they dramatize chance and fear into narratives, giving people a felt sense of order, fate, or intimacy with the unseen.