Quotes About Purpose

It occurred to him that he had not spent his life as he should have done. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.

Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

If a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for. It is the same with the life of humanity. If it had a programme of the life which awaited it before entering a new stage, it would be the surest sign that it was not living, nor advancing, but simply rotating in the same place.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said to himself.

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

As the sun and each atom of ether is a shphere complete in itself, yet at the same time only a part of a whole too vast for man to comprehend, so each individual bears within himself his own purpose, yet bears it ot serve a general purpose unfathomable to man.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!

I do not live my own life, there is something stronger than me which directs me. I suffer; but formerly I was dead and only now do I live.

If a man lives, then he believes in something. If he didn't believe that one must live for something, then he wouldn't live. If he doesn't see and doesn't understand the illusoriness of the finite, he believes in the infinite; if he does understand the illusoriness of the finite, he must believe in the infinite without which one cannot live.

No matter how old or how sick you are, how much or little you have done, your business in life not only isn't finished, but hasn't yet received its final, decisive meaning until your very last breath.

That one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.' 'But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...' 'Life won't leave one alone as it is.

Therein is the whole business of one's life; to seek out and save in the soul that which is perishing.

He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength.

Although on a conscious level a man lives for himself, he is actually being used for the attainment of humanity's historical aims. A deed once done becomes irrevocable, and any action comes together over time with millions of actions performed by other people to create historical significance.

Let the dead bury their dead; but, while we are alive, let us live.

without knowing who I am and why I'm here it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that and therefore I cannot live

What, indeed, had I done in all my thirty years of conscious life? Not only had I failed to live my life for the sake of all, but I had not even lived it for myself. I had lived as a parasite, and once I asked myself why I had lived, the answer I received was: for nothing.

But I am alive still. Now what's to be done? what's to be done?

Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!

What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?