Quotes About Purpose

Life's greatest tragedy is not that it will someday end, but that most only live to follow directions and sometimes we end up totally lost.

There's just so much to live for.

The women would not be looking at him like this if he were carrying lilies, reflects Jean-Paul. Flowers have there own silent vocabulary. There are blooms for love, for friendship, for sorrow, and for joy. He inspect the roses he is carrying. Long-stemmed and elegant, they have been grown, selected, arranged, and purchased for a single, unambiguous purpose: to seduce.

It is more important to use your gifts well than to settle for being content.

Sadly, we are losing the "soul" of our communities, ignoring the danger that when a community (or society) loses its soul, it loses itself.

Frankl's key message that we always have the ability to respond to anything that comes our way in life by exercising our capacity to find meaning. Life doesn't just happen to us—we are responsible for our own lives, and it is up to us, like Frankl was able to do even in the Nazi death camps, to actively find meaning in our lives. We cannot be victims, we cannot be passive participants in life and, most of all, we cannot be prisoners of our thoughts!

There is a crisis of meaning in the world today.

If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist.

This is the work that gives your life meaning; the work that lets you be your best self and helps you become a better self; the work that is an unparalleled pleasure when it goes well and is worth fighting and sacrificing for when it goes poorly; the work that you are willing to organize your life around.

The purpose of human life and the sense of happiness is to give the maximum what the man is able to give.

Our Lord's last words to the persons who called His conduct in question at this time were not merely apologetic, but judicial. "I came not," He said, "to call the righteous, but sinners;" intimating a purpose to let the self-righteous alone and to call to repentance and to the joys of the kingdom those who were not too self-satisfied to care for the benefits offered, and to whom the gospel feast would be a real entertainment.

There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know.

I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won't know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done the work we can do.

I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what it was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once

Aristotle: Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation. These two, your talents and the needs of the world, are the great wake-up calls to your true vocation in life. To ignore either is, in some sense, to lose your soul.

Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary

We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death

The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person.

There are so many things that seem doubtful because we do not bring the test of the highest motive to bear on them. Complications would fall away when we only wished to know and be like Christ.

Her life was a failure because she never focused on anything in particular. She didn't know how to concentrate her attention.

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce In man they join to some mysterious use.

And die of nothing but a rage to live