Quotes About Purpose

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?

Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.

Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

I didn't stand for anything. If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

It'll help your attitude to look for evidence of design.

Sometimes what's important is dull. Sometimes it's work. Sometimes the important things aren't works of art for your entertainment, X.

And here's a cliché' that's earned its status as a cliché': whether you're free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?

I'm not saying I'm able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without .. thinking twice.

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.

The point is this: If God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world?

I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do—a Work, if you like, with a great W; a Purpose to fulfil; ... a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy.

Mark to yourself the gradual way in which you have been prepared for, and are now led by an irresistible necessity to enter upon your great labour.

if these hours be dark, as indeed in many ways they are, at least do not let us sit deedless, like fools and fine gentlemen, thinking the common toil not good enough for us, and beaten by the muddle; but rather let us work like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against to-morrow's daylight...

Niente può essere un'opera artistica se non è anche utile, vale a dire se non assiste un corpo saldamente controllato dalla mente, o se non diverte, ristora ed eleva una mente in buona salute.

In the time of your life, live---so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for andy life your life touches.

I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

ednoho záÃ…â"¢ijového dne si uvÄ›domil, že už se definitivne musí rozhodnout. Pro jedno nebo pro druhé. Bu? z?stat a j?šte hloubÄ›ji upadnout do tísnivé ne?innosti a zoufalství, anebo si najít cestu, která vede ke svÄ›tu tam venku...