Quotes About Purpose

What a hell am I doing here? Why do I need a degree? I haven't heard a single sentence during all these lectures that would inspire one single line of poetry.

Reason? When you touch a ball charged with electricity, does the electricity have a reason to discharge itself? Or an apple, to grow, to ripen, to fall? Or to do good to a child? Or to be a mother? To love? To create? The best things have no need, no reason, they happen, the same as when you release an object and it falls.

As a result of her steadfast determination she kept faith with both the Falkland Islanders and with the will of Parliament. It is hard to believe that any other politician would have remained so straightforward in purpose and so single minded in commitment. It was the force of her personality and the strength of her certainty that enabled her to stand firm. The people who appreciated this most were the men who were about to do the fighting.

You cannot transform the world by wishful thinking -- you must do something about it.

How can God be happy and decree calamity? Consider that he has the capacity to view the world through two lenses. Through the narrow one he is grieved and angered at sin and pain. Through the wide one he sees evil in relation to its eternal purposes. Reality is like a mosaic. The parts may be ugly in themselves, but the whole is beautiful.

In order to this there must be something besides a general tendency to action; there must also be a particular tendency to that individual action.—If it should be asked, why the soul of man uses its activity, in such a manner as it does;

And holiness shall then be as it were inscribed on every thing, on all men's common business and employments, and the common utensils of life: all shall be dedicated to God, and applied to holy purposes: every thing shall then be done to the glory of God

Whatever is absolutely valuable in itself and is also capable of being sought and obtained by God is his ultimate end in creating the world.

He best knows his own heart, and what His own ends and designs were in the wonderful works which He has wrought.

I wanted not the favor of man to lean upon; for I knew Christ's favor was infinitely better, and that it was no matter when, nor where, nor how Christ should send me, nor what trials He should still exercise me with, if I might be prepared for His work and will.

That the Will is always determined by the strongest motive.

He uses the world as if he used it not, 1 Cor. 7. 31.

affair.—The mind being a designing Cause, only enables it to produce effects in consequence of its design; it will not enable it to be the designing Cause of all its own designs.

As you get older you strip away the things you don't have time for, and then you are left with only the things you have time for. Your life gets skinnier and skinnier until you wonder why you go on. You go on because there are things that must get done. You become no longer a person so much as a place, an unfunny place where things come to get done.

Leo Tolstoy wrote: "One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work."19

Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle around those things with other people, and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects. That's what religion is all about.

It is vain to say that human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it." (CHARLOTTE BRONTË, 1847)46

Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.

You can't have much of a mission without good allies and a good enemy.

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its "telos"—its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. A knife that does not cut well is not a good knife.

Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that "man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

It depends on what you think is the purpose of education. Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: "Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think."40

Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself. Once