Quotes About Purpose

I'm forty-five and I still have no idea what I want to be when I "grow up." But I'm starting to finally accept the fact that all I want to be is ME.

Mastery begins when formal education ends. Find the topic that sets your heart on fire. Then combust.

Freedom to help ourselves so that we can help others. Freedom to live the life we choose to lead, instead of having to live the life that has been chosen for us.

People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to "pay our dues," go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our "purpose," where now we can be happy. It doesn't work that way.

You can find the tools to be happy right now. I still don't know what my purpose is. I'm afraid I will never know. That makes me very happy. Maybe I can have lots of adventures between today and the day I die. Maybe I can do lots of different things. And if I don't—if I die even tomorrow—that's fine also. What does purpose mean when we are dead? We might as well choose to be happy now.

I don't like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy. People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to "pay our dues," go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our "purpose," where now we can be happy.

If the wants, needs, and prejudices of others, even those you love, take up too much mental real estate in your brain, then you have no room left over to actually be the person you were meant to be—the person who actually has the potential to help others.

The only things that really matter in this world are the relationships you have with the people you love, and the meaningful things that you do

So here's the solution and it works and can be applied at any age: get good at three, four, or five things. Then find the intersection. Then become the best in the world at the intersection. That's how you can pretend to do your special purpose.

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. One hundred years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave.

Is this just a dream? Can life be lived so large? Have I been able to live life so large? To live to my fullest potential?

Why limit yourself to a single passion? Here's a secret: you don't have to worry about "finding" your passion. You're naturally going to get passionate about what you are good

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. One hundred years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.

One hundred percent of the time there is a good reason and a real reason for everything.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?

But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.

I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni's, must first become a part of Giovanni's room.

But the conquest of the physical world is not man's only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

If men don't know what's happening, what they're doing, where they're going--what are women to do? If Richard doesn't know what kind of world he wants, how am I to help him make it? What am I to tell our sons?

Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice you can give anybody. And it's not advice, it's an observation.

I suppose this to mean that the song is still needed, still has work to do.