Quotes About Purpose

To know how to free oneself is nothing, the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom. (pp13 - The immoralist)

Une vie ne vaut rien, mais rien ne vaut une vie.

Ne trouvez-vous pas d'une stupidité caractéristique de l'espèce humaine qu'un homme qui n'a qu'une vie puisse la perdre pour une idée ? - Il est très rare qu'un homme puisse supporter, comment dirais-je ? sa condition d'homme...

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

I so want to meet the other women. I hear their voices, their weeping. Maybe they can explain to me why we're here. Or maybe I don't want to know.

He, who doesn't know why he lives, cannot feel love for people or for life itself. I don't love myself enough, so I don't love people enough. One of my major defects is impatience: I try to get rid of it, but i can't. I am not tolerant enough for my age. I suffer for this, because i can't approach people with sympathy. They annoy me.

Off course, life has no point. If it had, man would not be free. He'd become a slave to that point and his life would be governed by completely new criteria: the criteria of slavery. Like an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species. An animal carries out his slavish activities because it can feel the point of its life instinctively. Therefore its sphere is restricted. Man, on the other hand claims to aspire to the absolute.

In any case it is perfectly clear that the goal for all art—unless of course it is aimed at the 'consumer', like a saleable commodity—is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question.

It is now thirteen years since I ceased to accumulate wealth and began to distribute it. I could never have succeeded in either had I stopped with having enough to retire upon, but nothing to retire to.

For him there had to be a reason for everything; it had to make sense – and to make one sense, not two.

If you will the end, you must will the means.

For a democracy committed to being a great military power, its leaders professing to believe that war can serve transcendent purposes, the allocation of responsibility for war qualifies as a matter of profound importance.

You didn't fight so hard to survive – and then do nothing with your life.

Life is beautiful. Life is worth fighting for. It's not what happens to you, it's what you do with it.

The one object God had in making you a branch is that Christ may through you bring life to men. Your personal salvation, your business and care for your family, are entirely subordinate to this. Your first aim in life, your first aim every day, should be to know how Christ desires to carry out His purpose in you.

week with that blessed thought directly or indirectly: "I am in God's charge. My God is working out my life for me.

Resolve: "I will engage in a religious life only for the love of God; and I will endeavor to act only for Him; whatever becomes of me I will always continue to act purely for the love of God.

The image he bears decides his destiny.

I know that I have believed," is a valid testimony. But it is of great consequence that the mind should be led to see that at the back of our turning, and believing, and accepting of Christ, there was God's almighty power doing its work—inspiring our will, taking possession of us, and carrying out its own purpose of love in planting us into Christ Jesus.

The highest glory of the creature is in being only a vessel, to receive and enjoy and show forth the glory of God. It can do this only as it is willing to be nothing in itself, that God may be all.

Let us each find our what our work is and which souls are entrusted to our special prayers.

When He made man in His image it was, above all, with the purpose that the desires of man would be in harmony with the desires of God. This is the high honor of being made in the likeness of God—that we are to feel and wish just as God.

No question to the church is of more intense and pressing importance than this: What can be done to waken believers to a sense of their holy calling and make them see that to work for God and offer themselves as instruments through whom God can do His work ought to be the one purpose of their life?

we seek for the operation of the Spirit with the purpose of obtaining more power for work, more love in our life, more holiness in the heart, more light on Scripture or on our path. But all these gifts are subordinate to the great purpose of God. The Father bestowed the Spirit on the Son, and the Son gave Him to us for the purpose of revealing and glorifying Christ Jesus in us. The heavenly Christ must become for us a real and living personality who is always with us and in us.