Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to.

How can one learn to know oneself? Never by introspection, rather by action.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself?

Self knowledge is always bad news.

How can we know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Begin at once to do your duty and immediately you will know what is inside you.

I believe in the importance of seeking self-knowledge. The more I know myself, the more I feel empowered.

Self knowledge is best learned not by contemplation, but by action.

The real preparation for education is the study of one's self.

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.

The delights of self-discovery are always available.

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

The better you understand yourself the less cause you will find to love yourself.

Self-knowledge is an anchor that makes unpredictability tolerable.

Self-knowledge is the great power by which we comprehend and control our lives

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

Even with limited intelligence, knowing oneself is not as difficult as some say, but to act according to what one has realized about oneself in real life is as difficult as practicing anything else, compared to theory.

I think over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't.

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is.

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

Learning to cultivate an awareness of the known and unknown within one's being often leads to a healthier and more realistic sense of self.

By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.