A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The formation of one's character ought to be everyone's chief aim.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote Topics

Aim Character Chief Everyone Formation Ought

Quote Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German - Novelist
August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832

Spiritual formation is character formation. Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It's like education. Everyone gets an education; it's just a matter of which one you get.

Dallas Willard

As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I aim to be the disrupter in chief; I want to challenge those who aim to block change, stop development and restrict success. I want to challenge the caution that strangles risk-takers and go-getters.

Liz Truss

It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of activity or methods. It must always relate directly to how life is better for everyone. . . . The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment.

W. Edwards Deming

Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature, this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

Herbert Spencer

[T]he judicious reader ought to know what the chief character in any work of the imagination will naturally perform, according to the situation he is thrown into, as well as doth the author himself.

Sarah Fielding

Everyone receives spiritual formation, just as everyone gets an education. The only question is whether it is a good one or a bad one. We need to take a conscious, intentional hand in the developmental process. We need to understand what the formation of the human spirit is, and how it can best be done as Christ would have it done. This is an indispensable aspect of developing a psychology that is adequate to human life.

Dallas Willard

Man, having an ideal before him of that which he ought to be, and is not, and acting as though he possessed the character he ought to have, but has not, comes, by the very virtue of his aspiration, to possess the character he imagines.

William Batchelder Greene

One can aim at honor both as one ought, and more than one ought, and less than one ought. He whose craving for honor is excessive is said to be ambitious, and he who is deficient in this respect unambitious; while he who observes the mean has no peculiar name.

Aristotle

The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

Freeman Tilden

What sometimes goes on in all sorts of Christian institutions is not formation of people in the character of Christ; it's teaching of outward conformity. You don't get in trouble for not having the character of Christ, but you do if you don't obey the laws.

Dallas Willard

What leads to unhappiness is making pleasure the chief aim.

William Shenstone

What leads to unhappiness, is making pleasure the chief aim.

William Shenstone

The aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from...Circumcision of the heart.

Dallas Willard

Education has for its object the formation of character.

Herbert Spencer

The chief aim of wisdom is to enable one to bear with the stupidity of the ignorant.