Quotes About Purpose

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.

The overexamined life... It's not worth living.

You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!

The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.

And when you go around in circles, brother, the world is very big, but if you plow straight ahead it's small enough.

Everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.

I want whatever God has for me!

There are a few things that touch your soul, that you know you were put on this earth to see to fruition.

He'd been our center, the glue that held us together and gave us purpose.

A simple life is not seeing how little we can get by with—that's poverty—but how efficiently we can put first things first. . . . When you're clear about your purpose and your priorities, you can painlessly discard whatever does not support these, whether it's clutter in your cabinets or commitments on your calendar. (148)

Life has its rhythm ad we have ours. They're designed to coexist in harmony, so that when we do what is ours to do and otherwise let life be, we garner acceptance and serenity. (285)

todas las cosas que nos pasan son utiles aunque no sepamos porque

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

Man is originally characterized by his search for meaning rather than his search for himself. The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself .

Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes... Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.

The truth-that love is the highest goal to which man can aspire.