Quotes About Purpose

The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.

help people in a state of dependence sustain the value of existence.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

believe that the difference in death rates can be traced to the fundamental human need for a reason to live.

we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable. They provide, ultimately, only torment.

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.

Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here.

We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending.

If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

What would cutting the man apart accomplish?

For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It's been and experiment in social engineering, putting our fate in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. That experiment has failed... we seek a life of worth and purpose, yet are routinely denied the conditions that might make it possible, there is no other way to see what modern society has done.

Jessie F. Richardson Foundation

The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid...

You need to reach down and touch the thing that's boiling inside of you and make it somehow useful.

Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.

The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.

Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.

I wish to live whatever life I have as fully and as sweetly as possible

I am who I am doing what I came to do.

Aunt Ester: He didn't care if anybody else knew if he did or not. He knew. He didn't do it for the people standing around watching. He did it for himself. He say I'd rather die in truth than to live a lie. That way he can say that his life is worth more than a bucket of nails. What is your life worth, Mr. Citizen? That what you got to find out. You got to find a way to live in truth. If you live right you die right.

Wanting to want something isn't the same as wanting it. I suppose what I really wanted, then, was to give more of a shit, because about certain things, I simply did not.

The more time I spent at the Finches', the more I realized what a waste of my life this school crap was. It was nothing but a holding tank for kids without bigger plans or ideas.

To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point.