“If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.” — JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE”
Source: Angel Words: Visual Evidence of How Words Can Be Angels in Your Life
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Doreen Virtue 4
American writer 1958Related quotes

Biographical memoir: "John von Neumann (1903 - 1957)" in Year book of the American Philosophical Society (1958); later in Symmetries and Reflections : Scientific Essays of Eugene P. Wigner (1967), p. 261
Context: A deep sense of humor and an unusual ability for telling stories and jokes endeared Johnny even to casual acquaintances. He could be blunt when necessary, but was never pompous. A mind of von Neumann's inexorable logic had to understand and accept much that most of us do not want to accept and do not even wish to understand. This fact colored many of von Neumann's moral judgments. "It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature." Only scientific intellectual dishonesty and misappropriation of scientific results could rouse his indignation and ire — but these did — and did almost equally whether he himself, or someone else, was wronged.

Preface.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Context: We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.”
Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Man as man can never know God: His wishing, seeking, and striving are all in vain.”
In "Karl Barth's Conception of God" (1952) http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol2/520102BarthsConceptionOfGod.pdf by Martin Luther King, Jr., King cites this as a statement of Barth's in The Epistle to the Romans, p. 91, but it does not actually appear in the 1933 translation of Edwin Hoskyns. It may be a paraphrase of some of Barth's ideas which were incorrectly cited.
Disputed

"Alien Dreamtime" a multimedia event recorded live. (27 February 1993)
“When you seem to be listening to my words, they are your words, with me listening.”
Cuando me parece que escuchas mis palabras, me parecen tuyas mis palabres y escucho mis palabras.
Voces (1943)