Quotes About Purpose

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. 

There's no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won't say that if you refuse me you'll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose.

My dear young lady,' said her distinguished friend, 'isn't to live exactly what I'm trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?

This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money--it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful--this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity.

and with this reminder other things came to her -- how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinantly valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn't mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price.

I can't make out what you're up to . . . You strike me as having mysterious purposes — vast designs.

Isabel, as she herself grew older, became acquainted with revulsions, with disgusts; there were days when the world looked black and she asked herself with some sharpness what it was that she was pretending to live for.

Ah yes, there had been intention, there had been intention, Isabel said to herself; and she seemed to wake from a long pernicious dream.

Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it—to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality!

One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life.

In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted any thing

I don't know why we live, but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about, and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup.

he wished to do everything because he was lucid and quiet

Well, intensity with ignorance—what do you want worse?

much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life.

I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.

Do not be duped by little duties. Do not be a chore man all your days.

I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.

What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, i thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

And no one sets about saving the world unless he has first experienced the miracle of personal salvation.

The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.

Every man has his own destiny;the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him

When man becomes fully conscious of his powers, his role, his destiny, he is an artist and he ceases his struggle with reality.