Alexandra Stoddard Quotes

Our busy lives force us to focus on things we do from day to day. But the development of character comes only as we focus on who we really are.

The real preparation for education is a study of one's self. The training of the teacher...is something far more than a learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit.

Every decision you make ... is a decision about Who You Are.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Genius develops in quiet places; character out of the full current of human life.

It's hard to know who you are until you're cracked open a little bit.

I think the better you know yourself as a person, the better an actor you can be.

In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.

No magic formula can completely prepare us for crises in life. However, each choice we make now will impact how we handle those crises in the future. Make your choice count. Dedicate time each day to developing your character. If you do, courage will be there when you need it most.

The shape of your character is the shape of your future.

It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.

You have to be willing to expose yourself, at least to yourself, to get to some kind of truth about a character.

Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone else's traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a man's character is, the better it fits him.

The course of our lives is determined by how we react--what we decide and what we do--at the darkest of times. The nature of that response determines a person's true worth and greatness.

Every decision you make - every decision that you make every second - is not a decision about what to do, it is a decision about who you are. Every act is an act of self-definition.

A talent can be cultivated in tranquility; a character only in the rushing stream of life.

And I thought, you know, a little gender confusion makes a better person. A little adversity in life at an early age. It's character building.

Often the deep valleys of our PRESENT will be UNDERSTOOD only by LOOKING BACK on them from the mountains of our FUTURE experience. Often we can’t see the LORD’S HAND in our lives until long after the trials have passed. Often the most difficult times of our lives are ESSENTIAL building blocks that form the FOUNDATION of our CHARACTER and pave the way to FUTURE opportunity, understanding, and happiness.

Sometimes it's what you don't do that makes you who you are.

You make some big grandoise decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself.

We discover our character through decisions under pressure.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Your commitments can develop you or destroy you, but either way, they will define you.

Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"