Quotes About Purpose

Tan sólo escribe cosas dignas de ser leídas el que únicamente escribe para decir algo.

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It

It was human history, masquerading as God's Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole.

Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person's life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society.

the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.

Asl?nda insanlar?n baÄŸl?l??a ihtiyac? olduÄŸunu savundu. BaÄŸl?l?k ille de mutluluk getirmez ve hatta ac? verici olabilir ancak hepimiz hayatlar?m?z? tahammül edilebilir k?lmak için kendimizin d???nda bir ÅŸeye adanm??l??a ihtiyaç duyar?z. Bu olmadan bize yaln?zca arzular?m?z rehberlik eder ki onlar da geçici, kaprisli ve doyumsuzdur.

In the past, surviving into old age was uncommon, and those who did survive served a special purpose as guardians of tradition, knowledge, and history.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life--to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.

we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable.

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don't, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not.

and she asks if either might have anything to do with this.

We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way.

life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about.

The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves. This was, to him, an intrinsic human need. The cause could be large (family, country, principle) or small (a building project, the care of a pet). The important thing was that, in ascribing value to the cause and seeing it as worth making sacrifices for, we give our lives meaning.

This place where half of us will typically spend a year or more of our lives was never truly made for us.

AT THE CENTER of Wilson's work was an attempt to solve a deceptively simple puzzle: what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.