Quotes About Purpose

Self-improvement is important, but it needs to be conducive to your happiness. If an ambition will not make you or those you care about any happier, then there really is no point in striving to be someone else. You should carefully consider your reasons for the ideal self you construct and then select goals and ambitions that are sensible and conducive to your happiness.

Ultimately, we should all be seeking to use our time in ways that bring us the greatest overall pleasure and purpose for as long as possible. Just as you cannot recover time that is lost, you cannot recover happiness that is lost. Staying in a boring job or an annoying relationship simply prolongs the misery and any future happiness is unlikely to fully compensate for this loss. Lost happiness is lost forever.

So experiences of pleasure and purpose are all that matter in the end. Hedonism is the school of thought that holds that pleasure is the only thing that matters in the end. By adding sentiments of purpose to pleasure, I define my position as sentimental hedonism. I am a sentimental hedonist and I think that, deep down, we all are.

To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at different times. But you do need to feel both. I call this the pleasure-purpose principle—the PPP.

Mig would be happier if he found something purposeful to do (in exchange for some of his fun stuff) and Lisa would be happier if she had a little more fun (in exchange for some of her time spent feeling purposeful).

Day to day, moment to moment, you feel sentiments of pleasure, purpose, pain, and pointlessness.

My research and my experiences tell me that life is less about trading off happiness now for happiness later (and vice versa) and more about trading off pleasure and purpose at different rates at different times.

Our attention is attracted to what's new, remember, so using varied skills focuses our attention on them, thus making purpose more salient.

I'll show that the key to happiness is finding pleasure and purpose in everyday life.

Yes, there is another important category of feelings that matter to you, and these are the feelings of purpose and pointlessness you feel. I will use these adjectives as shorthand for a range of positive and negative feelings, such as fulfillment, meaning, and worthwhileness on the one hand and boredom and futility on the other.

Purpose is a simpler construct than pleasure because it's largely nonaroused, so either it's good (purposeful) or bad (pointless).

There is pleasure (or pain) and purpose (or pointlessness) in all that you do and feel. They are separate components that make up your overall happiness from an experience.

To assess purpose, three adjectives were added—focused, engaged, competent/able—as well as three statements: "I feel the activities in this episode . . .": were worthwhile and meaningful; were useful to other people; helped me achieve important goals. The response scale for all questions ranged from 0 (not at all) to 6 (very strongly).

Translation: the primary purpose of all the language in the Bible and in the creeds and catechism is to tell us how to live rather than provide us with clear, final answers about the nature of God and the universe.

Actions and words that flow from anger are generally going to be violent, physically, verbally, psychologically. Their purpose will be to hurt. For this reason, Buddhists hold that if you're trying to combine compassion with anger, you're kidding yourself. Anger opens the door to violence. And once you're violent, you've cut off your interconnectedness and profoundly jeopardized your ability to love.

What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.

At the end of the day the question comes, what are you doing for the world? You have to try to do something that's going to add something positive.

and it is said that Waugh's witnessing numerous blunders and acts of overt cowardice there soured him permanently on the army, the war, and the pretense of high purpose claimed by both.

D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

It is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of a common task.

Where do we come from?" "What are we?""Where are we going?

Cats were put into the world to disprove the dogma that all things were created to serve man.

Yun often tells me, "We are absolutely nothing. We have nothing to be proud about. We have no abilities and nothing to offer God. The fact that he chooses to use us is only due to his grace. It has nothing to do with us. If God should choose to raise up others for his purpose and never use us again we would have nothing to complain about.

If you give God the right to yourself, he will make a holy experiment out of you. God's experiments always succeed.