Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Humans aren’t meant to solve the universe’s mysteries, but to discover their own purpose and stay within their mental limits.
In plain terms
Find your purpose, not universal answers.
What can you take from it?
Focus on personal responsibility within what you can comprehend.

Where it applies

  • career counseling
  • spiritual practice

Putting it to work

  • identify personal strengths
  • set realistic goals

Questions to consider

  • How do you know your mental limits?

Another view

Limits can be self‑imposed and restrictive.

More from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  1. Live dangerously and you live right.

    Permalink to quote #123
  2. Mathematicians are [like] a sort of Frenchmen; if you talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and then it is immediately something quite diffe…

    Permalink to quote #125
  3. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

    Permalink to quote #122

Related quotes

  1. Just as there are no little people or unimportant lives, there is no insignificant work.

    Yelena BonnerYelena Bonner quote #1
  2. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

    Horace MannHorace Mann quote #1
  3. Painting is an art, and the art in its whole is not a vain objets creation which get lost in the void, but a power which has a goal and must serve to the evolu…

    Wassily KandinskyWassily Kandinsky quote #2