Quotes About Purpose

It is, therefore, up to the patient to decide whether he should interpret his life task as being responsible to society or to his own conscience. There are people, however, who do not interpret their own lives merely in terms of a task assigned to them but also in terms of the taskmaster who has assigned it to them.

Being human means always being directed toward something other than oneself. [...] Human existence is not characterized by self-actualization but rather by what I call self-transcendence—pointing beyond itself.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

The, world is not, as a great existential philosopher has seen it, a manuscript written in a code we have to decipher. No, the world is no manuscript which we are asked to decipher, but cannot; it is, rather, a record which we have to dictate ourselves.

An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity  to realize values in creative work

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Just as the boomerang returns to the hunter who has thrown it, only if it has missed its target, man returns to himself, reflects upon himself and becomes over-concerned with self-interpretation only when he has missed his mission, and has been frustrated in his search for meaning.

But ultimately man can actualize himself only by fulfilling a meaning out there in the world rather than within himself so that self-actualization becomes an effect of "self-transcendence." Being human means relating and being directed to something or someone other than oneself.

Even if you don't expect anything from life, doesn't life expect something from you?

Under the same conditions, those who were oriented toward the future, toward a meaning that waited to be fulfilled—these persons were more likely to survive. Nardini and Lifton, two American military psychiatrists

What is actually man's concern is not to fulfill himself or to actualize himself but to fulfill meaning and to realize value. And only to the extent to which he fulfills concrete and personal meaning of his own existence will he also fulfill himself. Self-fulfillment occurs by itself; not through intention but as effect.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human

M]an never, or at least not normally and primarily, sees in the partners whom he encounters and in the causes to which he commits himself merely a means to an end; for then he actually would have destroyed any authentic relationship to them. Then, they would have become mere tools, being of use for him, but, by the same token, would have ceased to have any value, that is to say, value in itself.

O]ur patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful.

Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.

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. [...] If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness. Happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue. Happiness is available only as a by-product, as the side-effect of living out the self-transcendence of existence.

W]hat matters is not the meaning of man's life in general. To look for the general meaning of man's life would be comparable to the question put to a chess player: "What is the best move?" There is no move at all, irrespective of the concrete situation of a special game. The same holds for human existence inasmuch as one can search only for the concrete meaning of personal existence, a meaning which changes from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour.

You don't retire from a job (which may have become stale) but to an activity that is meaningful to you.

Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended  side-effect of one's 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.

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. Humans are rather in search of of a reason to be happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent in a given situtation.

There is no conceivable human condition in which man may be relieved of the tension between what he has done and, on the other hand, what he must yet do or should have done.

man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But

M]eaning must not coincide with being; meaning must be ahead of being; meaning sets the pace of being. Existence falters unless it is lived in terms of transcendence toward something beyond itself.