Quotes About Purpose

man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.

We're all gonna die trying to get it right, so aim high, and aim true. —Vance Joy

The catalyst of action is intent. It's the other end of the bullet.

Feeling deeply is a virtue, Bev. It allows life to take on meaning and at some point your joy will be even greater than if you'd simply drifted with the currents.

Talent," she said, "is Gods gift to you. What you do with it, is your gift back to him." ... The Blue Edge of Midnight, pg. 3.

life amounts, above all else, to the recruiting of witnesses.

What terrified her most was the thought that staying alive had become nothing more than a habit. That was it. A reflex action without further or deeper purpose.

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." -Abraham Lincoln

signify an intention that I should become any more

You don't have no idea who you are. And if you don't know who you are," Polly continued, "you can't know nothing about where you beee-long.

if money does not necessarily increase life satisfaction, what does?

I felt lack of inspiration. What is it at the end I was trying to achieve? Is it a promotion? Is it validation? Is it a great piece of work on TV? It kind of lost its meaning.

I think there must be more to life than answering emails at midnight and five in the morning.

I'm wasting my life … I haven't done anything worthwhile in years … I need to move somewhere else, do something else, anything … How come I'm not on the Sunday talk shows? How come I'm not in charge of something, like a business?

bird might think he deserves to swim as well as a fish, but if he sits moping on the riverbank instead of using the wings God gave him, the fox is going to eat him. "Your brother would rather have his own way than be happy. He's thrown away the grace he was given because it's not the grace he had in mind." The Truthspeaker paused to reflect on that. "There's not much hope for a person who won't live in the grace he's given." ***

Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?

Follow your passion. Nothing - not wealth, success, accolades or fame - is worth spending a lifetime doing things you don't enjoy.

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.

We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.

When everything is available, every lifestyle on offer, when all you have is freedom, but nothing to guide you in that freedom, "it's not so much that you lose the thread of the meaning of your life, you have trouble even staying focused on the question.

When you stop believing in God, there is no sudden explosion of light or darkness. The world continues on its accustomed course. The sky does not fall. The sun still shines. Life goes on. But something is lost nonetheless, something important that gives life connectedness, depth and a sense of purpose; that gives you a feeling of participating in something vast and consequential.

A creed that tells us that we are no more than selfish genes, with nothing in principle to separate us from the animals, in a society whose strongest motivators are money and success, in a universe that came into existence for no reason whatsoever and for no reason will one day cease to be, will never speak as strongly to the human spirit as one that tells us we are in the image and likeness of God in a universe he created in love.

What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning.

Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? These are questions to which the answer is prescriptive not descriptive, substantive not procedural. The result is that the twenty-first century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.