Quotes About Purpose

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Man is ... essentially a story-telling animal. That means I can only answer the question 'what am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question of 'what story or stories do I find myself a part of?

The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man

I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

Life is too brief and too rich to tiptoe through half-heartedly, rather than galloping at it with whooping excitement and ambition.

Ikigai is the overlap of what you want to do, what you ought to do, and what you have to do.

A day working hard on a project I care about is a day well spent. Find something you love. Do it well. Do it a lot.

The life that I could still live, I should live and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think

That's what happens when you've had great success in life—when you've achieved the one goal you always desired. You lose a sense of purpose. Your smallest anxieties fester and magnify. Your fears turn inward, and attach themselves to irrational concerns.

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.

We're all Poseidon's children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not." "Poseidon's children," he repeated. "Is that supposed to mean something?" "We came through. That's all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it's time to start doing something useful with our lives.

It's not the span of time that counts, but what you do with it. While you humans have been grubbing around the galaxy, looking for a sense of purpose, a meaning to pin on the chain of cosmic accidents that brought you shambling into existence, we have been doing great things. In the span of time that it takes you to sneeze, I can run the equivalent of a year's worth of human consciousness. Imagine all the thinking we have done since our emergence.

What's the point in longevity if every day is a grey duplicate of the one before?

Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

As CEO of Unilever, my personal mission is to galvanize our company to be an effective force for good.

Every team and club has its own personal goals and objectives, and I'm only concerned about mine.

If I'm not fighting for a good reason, then your personal life starts to get messy, and it's like, 'What am I doing this for?'

The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and at the foundation, the pre-eminence of family.

Personally, I've never done things just for money.

Personally, I've always known that I wanted to go back to work because I'm confident, and I'm certain that my daughter will have a better mother in me if I'm doing the things that I'm excited about and that I'm passionate about.

Everything I've done has been personally fun, important, and meaningful to me.

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it.

All work done mindfully rounds us out, helps complete us as persons.

I've lost perspective on what I'm doing. I think it's good for me to take a break and reassess why I'm doing it and how I'm doing it. And I think this is probably a good way to learn about that. I need a break from myself as much as I imagine the audience does.