Quotes About Purpose

I don't save the world for glory or power. I have neither and I don't care for them. In fact, I quite like it that the world doesn't know my name. I just do what I do for the people I love.

Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior god-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.

Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness. Utility the test of virtue.

You people with your quests annoy the pants off me.

A story should have a point, but a life doesn't need one. It just needs to be lived.

You are not what you intend, you are what you do. Intention and action are separated by a chasm

In the end, it is not what you choose to do that changes your destiny. It is what you choose to love.

I think what everyone should be doing, before it's too late, is committing themselves to what they really want to do with their lives.

Do not breathe simply to exist.

My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you'll do to a great extent means choosing who you'll be.

Money is for doing things, my love. Don't sit on it like a hen sits on an egg. It doesn't hatch. I should know. I've made enough of it.

How does this keep happening to you?" David said. "Because I look," Stevie replied. "A lot of things happen when you go out and do them on purpose.

I think something is art when it is created with intention. Serious intention. Even crazy intention. And I think something is beautiful if it reveals something important about what it means to be alive.

What greater wealth is there than to own your own life and to spend it on growing?

Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.

There was no action she could take against the men of undeined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them - nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter.

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . . and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.

She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state; then even limpness acquired purpose.

joy is one's fuel.

Life...had been defined as motion; man's life was purposeful motion; what was the state of a being to whom purpose and motion were denied, a being held in chains but left to breathe and to see all the magnificence of the possibilities he could have reached, left to scream "Why?" and to be shown the muzzle of a gun as sole explanation?

Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do what the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you. For the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom where you are needed by your brother men, better than you can know it in your unworthy little minds. And if you are not needed by your brother men, there is no reason for you to burden the earth with your bodies.

This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope.

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.

The men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational—it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands.