Quotes About Purpose

When what you're doing isn't just a means to an end, you're in no hurry to get it done.

Now they need only learn what life wants from humans. It's a big question, to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren't alone, and they never have been.

But hope and truth do nothing for humans without use. In the clumpy, clumsy fingerpaint of words, she searches for the use of Old Tjikko, up on that barren crest, endlessly dying and resurrecting in every change of climate. His use is to show that the world is not made for our utility. What use are we to trees?

Do you run away or toward?

And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

Now they need only learn what life wants from humans.

But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them.

In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.

And she takes him like someone who's sure that life has need of her.

She flips open the uppermost notebook, to the page where she has just written: In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.

Everything is so obvious, so blissfully clear. But her parents can't see it. There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

If life demanded a slavish commitment to one pursuit, there were worse things to commit to than calculating the cash value of death.

The third Hoel photographer keeps on taking pictures, just as he keeps going to church long after deciding that the entire faithful world has been duped by fairy tales. His pointless photographic ritual gives Frank Jr.'s life a blind purpose that even farming cannot give. It's a monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life.

whatever work your hands can do, do now, for there is no work for you in that place where you are going.

What do I do now, for the next forty years? What work can't the efficiency of unified mankind chop into pure fertilizer?

it. There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

With all those places to live? How come nobody's anywhere?

The inevitable result of any search for authenticity is that you always end up with something completely modern in intent, since the purpose of the performance lies in the present, not the past.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. p 101.

God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.

The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.