Quotes About Purpose

True seekers are different. On meeting them you feel their purpose, their energy, their integrity, their idealism, and their desire to close in on an answer. Something in life has awakened questions, has made them aware of a sense of need, has forced them to consider where they are in life. They have become seekers because something has spurred their quest for meaning, and they have to find an answer.

The truth is that we are a generation that has too much to live with and too little to live for.

To make the choice of career or profession on selfish grounds, without a true sense of calling, is "probably the greatest single sin any young person can commit, for it is the deliberate withdrawal from allegiance to God of the greatest part of time and strength.

Calling is the truth that God calls us to

Biography can overwhelm philosophy in the best of us.

For all of us, the time is short and the span of life is brief On top of that, our real human problem, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said in a direct rebuke to the modern illusion, is not just that life is short but that we waste so much of it-so that life ceases for us "just when we are getting ready for it."35 But

Time and history have meaning. Under the twin truths of God's sovereignty and human significance, time and history are going somewhere, and each us is not only unique and significant in ourselves, but we have a unique and significant part to play in our own lives, in our own generation, and therefore in the overall sweep of history.

Our life-purpose therefore comes from two sources at once—who we are created to be and who we are called to be. Not

As it happens, the differences are clear between the major answers to the search for purpose in life, and they lead in entirely different directions.

As theologian N. T. Wright points out, trees behave as trees, rocks as rocks and the seas as the seas, but "Only humans, it seems, have the capacity to live as something other than what they are.

the truth is this: We always have sure and sufficient reasons for knowing why we can trust God, but do not always know what God is doing and why.

The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.

Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.

Modern life assaults us with an infinite range of things we could do, we would love to do, or some people tell us we should do. But we are not God and we are neither infinite nor eternal. We are quite simply finite. We have only so many years, so much energy, so many gray cells, and so many bank notes in our wallets. 'Life is too short to...' eventually shortens to 'life is too short.

The key to changing the world is not simply being there, but an active, transforming engagement of a singularly robust and energetic kind.

This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.

Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.

I have no choice. I am a person with no reason to live. I know my lot. Yes, it would be great to die one day sooner.

I despised him as one fit only for amusement, a man with whom I associated for that sole purpose.

Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue.

no matter how difficult, because I would have a purpose in life, I would have hope.

People depend on death to be complete. While alive, they are all incomplete.

Those who wish to go on living can always manage to survive whatever obstacles there may be. That is splendid of them, and I daresay that what people call the glory of mankind is comprised of just such a thing. But I am convinced that dying is not a sin. It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world. Somewhere an element is lacking which would permit me to continue. I am wanting. It has been all I could do to stay alive up to now.

I wanted to write only what I wanted to write.