A Recipe for a Contented Life
'Nine requisites for contented living: health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of god. Hope enough to move all anxious fears concerning the future.'
--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
6 Comments:
He's pretty much just working his way through the fruits of the spirit (Gal 5:22-23), isn't he?
Ah, a man who knows the Bible, I see.
Once again, Goethe says so much.
As well as echoing Genesis, Goethe also prefigures Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which I wrote about recently. I wouldn't be surprised if Maslow had read Goethe; one of Maslow's great contributions was to reintroduce humanistic questions into the "science" of psychology, which can become overly mechanistic in its worldview at times.
It's a very old concept, and one constantly being rediscovered and reinvented.
That's an interesting progression of great thinkers, isn't it? I'm sure Maslow was not only familiar with Goethe but heavily influenced by him. Their essential messages are so much in sympathy with each other.
that really says it all, doesn't it? Thanks for sharing that one.
It does seem to cover the important bases, Diane.
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