Quotes About Purpose

But what mattered WHERE while EVERYWHERE was the same as NOWHERE! I had not yet, by doing something in it, made ANYWHERE into a place! I was not yet alive; I was only dreaming I lived! I was but a consciousness with an outlook! Truly I had been nothing else in the world I had left

Eternal Death Not fulfilling these relations, the man is undoing the right of his own existence, destroying his raison d'être, making of himself a monster, a live reason why he should not live.

For He regards men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, toward that image after which He made them that they might grow to it. Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress. A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.

Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work.

You say you didn't mean any harm: did you mean any good, Curdie?

The little prophet's head as he stood, did not reach the level of the draper's as he sat, but at this Drew dropped his head on his hands upon the table, as if bowed down by a weight of thought and feeling and worship. I say not, Polwarth went on, that so doing you will grow a rich man, but I say that so doing you will be saved from growing too rich, and that you will be a fellow-worker with God for the salvation of his world.

Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in the spiritual garden of God,--precious, each for his own sake, in the eyes of him who is even now making us,--each of us watered and shone upon and filled with life, for the sake of his flower, his completed being, which will blossom out of him at last to the glory and pleasure of the great gardener.

The fault lay with those who had brought him up to the church as to the profession of medicine, or the bar, or the drapery business—as if it lay on one level of choice with other human callings.

With him all is simplicity of purpose and meaning and effort and end-namely, that we should be as he is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness. It is so plain that any one may see it, every one ought to see it, every one shall see it. It must be so. He is utterly true and good to us, nor shall anything withstand his will.

The man who recognizes the truth of any human relation and neglects the duty involved is not a true man.... A man may be aware of the highest truths of many things, and yet not be a true man, inasmuch as the essentials of manhood are not his aim: he has not come into the flower of his own being.

To be, or not to be, that is the Question:

Why, you don't seem even to know the good of the things you are constantly doing. Now don't mistake me. I don't mean you are good for doing them. It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don't fancy it's very good of you to do it. The thing is good, not you.

But may not one sometimes make a mistake without being able to help it?' 'Yes. But so long as he is not after his own ends, he will never make a serious mistake.

The man whose vision is weak, but who, as far as he sees, and desirous to see farther, does the thing he sees, is a true man. If a man knows what is, and says it is not, his knowing does not make him less than a liar.

but i doubt if any prolonged contemplation of death is desirable for those whose business it now is to live, and whose fate it is ere long to die. It is a closing of God's hand upon us to squeeze some of the bad blood out of us, and, when it relaxes, we must live the more diligently- not to get ready for death, but to get more life.

The door into life generally opens behind us and the only wisdom for one haunted with the scent of unseen roses is work.-George MacDonald

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY

For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?

Do you know why you're here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.

The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition—in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.

at bottom it is always a writer's tendency, his "purpose," his "message," that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs.

For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.