Quotes About Purpose

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Because we are all designers in the sense that all of us deliberately design our lives, our rooms, and the way we do things.

the first edition of this book, then called POET, The Psychology of Everyday Things, I started with these lines: "This is the book I always wanted to write, except I didn't know it." Today I do know it, so I simply say, "This is the book I always wanted to write.

5. In all things, before you begin something, be cautious and ponder what the outcome may be. In all that you do and undertake, think constantly whether you would want to be doing it if that very hour you were to be called by death to appear before God's judgment. For this reason never allow yourself to be found in any situation in which you could not trust or hope for your salvation. Live every day as if you might die and appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

Well, what shall I do next? What is the next thing demanded of me by history?

The most important thing in life is to love what you're doing, because that's the only way you'll ever be really good at it.

His characters may be cardboard, but each has a clear, uncomplicated purpose. Every moment of the story contributes to building conflict.

There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing.

Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.

Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.

It's a beautiful moment when somebody wakes up to this reality, when they realize God created them so other people could enjoy them, not just endure them.

It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.

It is when people do not allow God to show up through them ... that the world collapses in on itself.

If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.

Book of Ecclesiastes, God is saying... Write a good story, take somebody with you and let me help

Passion about nothing is like pouring gasoline in a car without wheels. It isn't going to lead anybody anywhere.

I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.

We were made to be distracted by life, by story.

Relationships matter. They matter as much as exercise and nutrition. And not all relationships help us reach our goals. God doesn't give us crying, pooping children because he wants to advance our careers. He gives them to us for the same reason he confused language at the Tower of Babel, to create chaos and deter us from investing too much energy in the gluttonous idols of self-absorption.

God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me specifically into the story, and He put us in specifically with the sunsets in the rainstorms as though to say, Enjoy your place in My story, the very beauty of it means it's not about you, and in time that will give you comfort.

Relationships are teleological. They're all going somewhere and they're turning us into something, hopefully something better, something new.