Quotes About Purpose

We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

From eighteen to fifty-five was the unfolding. Then, when it happened at fifty-five, they knew what they were born for. When that moment comes, it is great and it is all synchronicity. We know then that grace is at work and we are not manufacturing our own lives.

The full Christian story is saying that Jesus died, and Christ "arose"—yes, still as Jesus, but now also as the Corporate Personality who includes and reveals all of creation in its full purpose and goal.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

We are glad when someone survives, and that surely took some courage and effort. But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.

Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

As Mary Oliver puts it, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

When you put the Gospels in someone's life who hasn't walked any journeys yet, who hasn't lost, suffered, longed, and thirsted for anything, they will use it for power - I promise you. For personal power, reputational power, economic power, because that's where the ego always goes. We will use God for our own purposes which is the ultimate idolatry. But if you have made the journey into powerless somehow, I will be happy to put the gospel in your hands.

The end is already planted in us at the beginning, and it gnaws away at us until we get there freely and consciously.

If you don't walk into the seond half of your own life, it is you who does not want it.

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong "container" or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life, which does not mean we do it well. The second task, I am told, is more encountered than sought; few arrive at it with much preplanning, purpose, or passion.

But it takes us much longer to discover "the task within the task," as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.

Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control.

Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you? Sully: Not often. Now and then.

Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom.

For years now he'd believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.

Non basta una vita One life isn't enough

A silly lie. A lie so small and to so little purpose that it suggested to Miles a way of life, a strategy for confronting the world, and this was further reason—if any was needed—to doubt the truth of everything the man had said inside.

Wondrous! he thought, how the heart leaps when one is chosen, especially later in life, after one would suppose the time for choosing and being chosen has passed.

Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

I earned good money,' he said. 'I was driving in good teams, I was winning races, I had pole positions … basically, not a lot to prove. So what is the point to take still the risk? That was my question to myself last week. But the other side is, what is the rest of your life?

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

If we don't know what we do and why we do it, everything else will look like a possible option.