All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
The field of experience is the whole universe in all directions. Theory remains shut up within the limits of human faculties.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Experience encompasses everything we can perceive and learn, while theory is limited by our understanding.
Goethe emphasizes the vastness of human experience as encompassing the entire universe, suggesting that our direct experiences are limitless. In contrast, he notes that theory is confined to the capabilities of human intellect, indicating that while we can theorize about the universe, true understanding comes from direct experience rather than abstract thought alone.
Themes
ExperienceTheoryUniverseUnderstandingKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of practical learning versus theoretical education.
More from Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
All quotes βDestiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From its springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
Seldom in the business and transactions of ordinary life, do we find the sympathy we want.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
Similar quotes
If the Word of God is living and powerful, and if the Lord does all things whatsoever he wills; if he said, "Let there be light", and it happened; if he said, "let there be a firmament", and it happened; ...if finally the Word of God himself willingly became man and made flesh for himself out of the most pure and undefiled blood of the holy and ever Virgin, why should he not be capable of making bread his Body and wine and water his Blood?... God said, "This is my Body", and "This is my Blood."
John Of DamascusRead
Doomed Lord's Passing. For the mind of man alone is free to explore the lofty vastness of the cosmic infinite, to transcend ordinary consciousness, to roam the secret corridors of the brain where past and future melt into one...And universe and individual are linked, the one mirrored in the other, and each contains the other.
Michael MoorcockRead
What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty; and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.
Louis D. BrandeisRead
One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
Orhan PamukRead
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
William JamesRead
That which is given with pride and ostentation is rather an ambition than a bounty.
Seneca The YoungerRead