Quotes About Purpose

Learning isn't a means to an end; it is an end in itself.

The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail. All of the Grail quests are to serve God. If one understands this and drops his idiotic notion that the meaning of life is personal happiness, then one will find that elusive quality immediately at hand.

The truth is that no nation can be constantly prepared to undertake a full-scale war at any moment and still hope to maintain any of the other purposes in which people are interested and for which nations are founded.

No greater glory, no greater honor, is the lot of man departing than a feeling possessed deep in his heart that the world is a better place for his having lived

Dreams, [...], are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses the support of dreams, life dissolves.

Life, as we know it, could hardly continue if men did not soon slay the dreamer inside them

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely

Retirement? You're talking about death, right?

Why is man man? As long as we have had minds to think with, stars to ponder upon, dreams to disturb us, curiosity to inspire us, hours free for meditation, words to place our thoughts in order, the question like a restless ghost has prowled the cellars of our consciousness.

Life is; live it!

The source of all life warms the living for a moment, holding them briefly before they go back to wasting their lives.

No matter how intellectual and multicolored motherhood becomes as children grow older, the part that says My purpose on earth is to keep you alive has never totally dissipated. Magical thinking on all sides.

Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay

What we have lost, I think, is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals—the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.

An economy should exist for the people who inhabit it, not the other way around. The purpose of an economy is to provide everyone with opportunities to live full, happy, and productive lives.

The human soul aspires to higher things than the society columns of the New York Sunday papers, and the frivolous chatter of an overheated ballroom.

The Soul's Upward Yearning by Fr. Robert Spitzer, the intergalactically smart Jesuit who once served as president of Gonzaga University and who now directs the Magis Center on matters of faith, reason, and science,

Great ends demand great means.

How do we come to choose what it is that we spend our days doing? Would we choose it again if we could? Did we choose it today, or has it simply carried us along somehow?

Everything in this business makes sense, because it serves a real purpose, fills a need that's a part of living. Even a single nail, like this one, fulfills a function. Drive it into a crucial place and you can depend on it to do a job, keep on doing it for a hundred years to come. Long after we're dead and gone, both of us.

Sir Thomas More: Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one. Richard Rich: If I was, who would know it? Sir Thomas More: You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.

This account of him [Thomas More] developed as I wrote: what first attracted me was a person who could not be accused of any incapacity for life, who indeed seized life in great variety and almost greedy quantities, who nevertheless found something in himself without which life was valueless and when that was denied him was able to grasp his death.

To what purpose? I am a dead man. (To Cromwell) You have your desire of me. What you have hunted me for is not my actions, but the thoughts of my heart. It is a long road you have opened. For first men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts. God help the people whose Statesmen walk your road.

The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.