Goethe’s wisdom on balancing learning & expression: Insights for creatives and educators

My brother-in-law is a huge fan of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Fun fact: I recently discovered that the proper German pronunciation of his name is “Goo-t’h.” Don’t worry if you’ve been saying it differently—apparently, people struggled with it even in his own time!

Whenever I visit my sister’s house, I seem to stumble upon another fascinating book about Goethe. The latest discovery is Love, Life, Goethe by John Armstrong. In this book, Armstrong explores Goethe’s lifelong quest to balance his inner life with his outer expression:

“[Goethe’s] thoughts and feelings seek external manifestation: the inner is to become the outer. And through externalization, his inner states will—hopefully—lose their fleeting, private and capricious character and be made precise, ordered and available to others.”

Armstrong highlights the delicate balance Goethe sought:

“Each is diminished when pursued alone. The urge to communicate what is going on ‘inside’ becomes a boring egoism, unless what is expressed is substantial and serious. On the other hand, exhaustive taking in—visiting all the famous places, reading everything—is a sterile occupation unless what is absorbed becomes personally enriching.”

In other words, self-expression loses its meaning if it lacks depth, while learning without personal growth becomes hollow. Goethe emphasized the need for inner transformation to complement both learning and self-expression.

Balancing Learning and Teaching in Everyday Life

As both an educator and a creative, I deeply resonate with these polarities. I see them reflected not just in myself but also in others—and especially in today’s educational systems. The default approach in modern society is to treat the first 22-or-so years of life as a time for learning, after which we’re expected to graduate and seamlessly step into the world as fully functioning adults, ready to express ourselves.

But adult life doesn’t work that way. A truly fulfilling life requires a constant balancing act: sometimes we are learners, absorbing new ideas and experiences; other times we are teachers, sharing our knowledge and creative output with the world.

In my book, Getting Messy, I refer to this self-expressive, outward-focused mode as teaching. In a healthy life, we move fluidly between these two modes:

• Learning: Taking in the world, growing, and transforming internally.
• Teaching: Sharing, creating, and expressing our unique voice to the larger world.

Healthy adults make this shift effortlessly, embracing both modes as essential parts of life. Goethe’s wisdom serves as a reminder that neither learning nor self-expression can stand alone—they must be in harmony.