The Ego and Its Own
"The Ego and Its Own" opens and closes with a quotation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that reads "I have taken up my cause without foundation", with the unstated next line of the poem being "and all the world is mine". One of Stirner's central ideas is that in realizing the self is "nothing" one is said to "own the world" because—as the book states in its last line—"all things are nothing to me" ["Ibidem", p. 324]: