All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
Which government is the best? The one that teaches us to govern ourselves.
Interpretation
The best government encourages self-governance among its citizens.
This quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe suggests that the most effective form of government is one that empowers individuals to take responsibility for their own actions and decisions. By fostering a sense of self-governance, a government can cultivate informed, engaged citizens who contribute positively to society, rather than relying solely on external authority to dictate their behavior.
In practice
In a discussion about civic responsibility, one might quote Goethe to emphasize the importance of self-governance.
All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.
There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From its springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.
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!
Seldom in the business and transactions of ordinary life, do we find the sympathy we want.
Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.
Therefore, I do not wish to consider any proposition to cede any portion of our tribal holdings to the Great Father.
And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.
That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.
Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.
The reason we care so much about what happens to the likes of Lady Gaga is not because her shenanigans will ever impact our lives; rather because our brain doesn't realize there's a difference between rock stars we know about and relatives we know.
Bad people...are in conflict with themselves; they desire one thing and will another, like the incontinent who choose harmful pleasures instead of what they themselves believe to be good.
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