Quotes About Purpose

As we prepare ourselves to celebrate Christ's birth, we might do well to ask how he is our Lord, that is, the purpose of our life. To call him Lord is to claim him as our ruler and to take our direction from him. But following Jesus is about more than obedience. If he is our purpose, he is our center of gravity, the radiant love whose beauty draws us to itself as the fulfillment of our longing and the perfection of our nature.

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on this earth.

And did you get what you wanted from this life,...?

They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.

What is he?' 'What would you have him be?

he had seen the worst and best of the rest, and had gone from a fraternity of men bent on trivial gain by any means, including murder, to a fellowship of men who would sacrifice even their own lives for the greater good. His ambition was to be like them, to be noble by strength of purpose and clarity of vision rather than by accident of birth.

Tis a wise thing to know what is wanted, and wiser still to know when 'tis achieved

You must step forward, Arutha. You will never be the man for whom you were named, and you will never be your father, but nature didn't intend for you to be either of those men, no matter how worthy they were. You must become the best man you are capable of.

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

One must exert oneself in order to achieve a life that matters. If you don't exert yourself, or if your exertions don't amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.

Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.

My friend Chip Ward speaks of "the tyranny of the quantifiable," of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer.

The evolutionary argument for altruism could draw from [Victor] Frankl to argue that we need meaning and purpose in order to survive, and need them so profoundly we sometimes choose them over survival.

We have, most of us, a deep desire for this democratic public life, for a voice, for membership, for purpose and meaning that cannot be only personal. We want larger selves and a larger world.

Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it.

In those days we were exploring who we wished to become, what the world might give us, and what we might give it, and so, though we did not know it, wandering was our real work anyway.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writer are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Like a life, a journey assumes a shape and a meaning that are only clear afterward, and like a journey, a life requires that you learn to let go of the plan when the actuality departs from it, to embrace what's arriving, let go of what's departing, to move forward and not get stuck. You can cover the same ground with entirely different purposes.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.