Quotes About Purpose

Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.

Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.

We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

While life will always be filled with sound and fury, it can be more than a tale signifying nothing.

The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism reads, "What is the chief end of man?" The Catechism's answer: "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever."[10] God graciously linked the pursuit of our chief purpose with our greatest experience of joy.

If the universe is created, then there must be reality beyond the universe...The Creator is the source of life and establishes its meaning and purpose....To study the origin and development of the universe is, in a sense, to investigate the basis for any meaning and purpose to life. Cosmology has deep theological and philosophical ramifications.

I am a road man for the lords of karma.

Nonetheless, I felt like I knew him well enough so that we did not have to do much talking. From the very beginning I had felt a definite contact with Yeoman, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is pretty cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.

To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that we can't BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal.

A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

And only those who can see above and beyond the American goal of respectable mediocrity can enjoy a life that leads to anything but a struggle to attain that end.

Well, he said. I hope to God I never make forty -- I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you've ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don't see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I've mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

Finding meaning in life is not about looking for a specific goal. That is a fruitless path. It is about seeking a life path that is the right one for you. Decide on the way you desire to live and do all you can to create that life. Only you can define what pathway is best for you and make choices in that direction. That being said, everything is possible, once you strive towards it.

The minute I saw it, I felt that here was the place I'd been looking for.

We can cite the tribesman who pointed out that the circles in spider webs are sticky, whereas the radii are not. This means, he said, that if you wander from side to side in life you get stuck, but if you move toward its center you don't. p380

If we were to take Hinduism as a whole...and compress it into a single affirmation, we would find it saying: You can have what you want. This sounds promising, but it throws the problem back in our laps. For what do we want? It is easy to give a simple answer- not easy to give a good one. p13

It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.

The purpose of life's good and bad is to teach us to be better people, which is why you have to overcome this and appreciate the beauty of life. That's what God wants from us.

It occurred to me then, as it has before, that that is what men are really for. Both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill.

Don't you have a religion? Dorolow asked Horza. Yes, he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. My survival. So... your religion dies with you. How sad, Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass.

Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.