Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

My personality doesn't interest me.

One of my problems is to find the self.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

We cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves, from ourselves.

I tell the truth, and I expose myself as a weak, misguided, misdirected, dysfunctional human being I used to be.

I think self-knowledge is the rarest trait in a human being.

I have faced up to what I am.

Know thyself.

We're not the best about knowing what's the most interesting about ourselves.

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

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog's foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject.

It's more important to know your weaknesses than your strengths.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

I'm very realistic. I know my boundaries - I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at.

Writing is a really good first step toward that goal of knowing yourself.

It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.

The most valuable thing I can share is the importance of living in truth. Sometimes, facing those truths can actually be your worst fear.

I always write to understand my place in the world. I can see myself and my life unfold on the page, and I can understand my strengths, my weaknesses - I can see where I need to step up a bit.

I discovered myself!

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

I think people come and go, 'I'm going to find the real Gary. What is it... the real Gary? I've got to find it.' But the thing is, it's pretty much what you see is what you get. I'm just like this. There's no hidden viciousness.