Quotes About Purpose

The human animal needs meaning as well as food and air and sex and water. The sense that life is meaningless is at the root of a great deal of depression, aggression, and addiction, which can only be addressed by a restoration of the sense that life is meaning-full.

The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through.

I think that the great trick in life, wherever you are in the journey, is to do what you love and let the universe support it. When we do what we love, every day is a holiday.

The main thing is not to be dead.

So there is a foreign intelligence purpose for every one of our FISA warrants.

One does what one is; one becomes what one does.

I don't think I care very much about being rich, Jennie. I just want to paint--and to know what I'm painting. That's what's so hard--to know what you're painting; to reach to something beyond these little, bitter times...

Need is a weak word. has nothing to do with what people get. Ain't what you need that matters. It's what you do.

Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you

What can we know? How we should act? What might we hope for?

For whatever you live is life.

Every ounce of suffering has a purpose that God can use for good, if we only let Him.

even if everything that happens to me isn't good, God can still bring good out of everything.

From a strictly Darwinian standpoint flowers would seem a needless extravagance. Evidently the Life Force has no use for Darwin or Darwinism. The Life Force is an artist.

There's something beyond one's self

Eine jede Hoffnung ist ohne Sinn. Kein Mensch verfalle auf die Idee, auf die Erfüllung seiner Träume zu sinnen. Vielmehr soll er den Irrsinn des Hoffens begreifen. Hat er ihn begriffen, darf er hoffen. Wenn er dann noch träumen kann, hat sein Leben Sinn.

When you are down to nothing, God is up to somethng. It is up to you to reach out to find what God is up to for you.

a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total.

You must realize, Mr. Blaine, that a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him.

What was I supposed to do? Was I meant to be nothing but God? I had tried the God business and found it too limited. It was a job for a simple-minded egomaniac. There had to be something else for me to do – something more meaningful, more expressive of my true self. I am convinced of it! That is my problem, and that is the question I ask of you: What am I to do with myself?

Most men lead lives of quiet aspiration.

In every man's life there is something he feels driven to do, something that pricks him at the core of his soul so long as it remains undone, and yet as he approaches the doing of it he will know fear, for perhaps to fulfill the obsession will bring him more pain than pleasure.

Shortly before his death, he gave a toast to economics and economists -'trustees, not of civilisation, but of the possibilities of civilisation'. Only someone with a fine sense of language, and an Edwardian sense of life's purpose, would have chosen exactly those words.

Affliction is not sent in vain, young man, from that good God, who chastens whom he loves.