Quotes About Purpose

'Tis the motive exalts the action, 'Tis the doing, and not the deed.

Now that I'm here, where am I?

I have found that it is much easier to make a success in life than to make a success of one's life.

Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life he is living, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger.

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savour) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

Remember, if God had wanted this to be perfect, he never would have had me up here.

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.

Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.

No yesterdays are ever wasted for those who give themselves to today.

You are younger today than you ever will be again. Make use of it for the sake of tomorrow.

The future belongs to those who live intensely in the present.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

Do not manage as if you had ten thousand years before you. Look you, death stands at your elbow; make the most of your minute, and be good for something while it is in your power.

Study as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow.

Live wastes itself while we are preparing to live.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside of prison is their sense of futility. Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

Before he sets out, the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities, to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander, ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.

It is a great misfortune to be of use to nobody; scarcely less to be of use to everybody.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.