Quotes About Purpose

Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?

You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands

What does Nihilism mean?—That the highest values are losing their value.

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far — and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!

When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind - when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives - when such a mission inflames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order!

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in "the beyond"—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether.

You implanted your highest goal into the heart of those passions: then they became your virtues and joys.

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.

What is heavy? so asks the spirit that would bear much, and then kneels down like the camel, and wants to be well laden.

A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves— and who want to go where I want to go.

Back then you carried your ashes to the mountain; would you now carry your fire into the alley?

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.

The labyrinthine man never seeks the truth but always and only his Ariadne.

To live as it pleases me, or not to live at all.

Modern Socialism wants to create a secular version of Jesuitism: everybody a perfect instrument. But the purpose remains to be discovered. What is it all for!

We have invented the concept "goal": in reality, goals are absent . . .

He who cannot find the way to HIS ideal, lives more frivolously and shamelessly than the man without an ideal.

Nu viaÅ£a veÅŸnic? e important?, ci veÅŸnica însufleÅ£ire.

Do I then strive after happiness? I strive after my work!

Why should one live? All is vain! To live- that is to thresh straw; to live- that is to burn oneself and yet not get warm.-

Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!

Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

Nobody is responsible for being here in the first place, for being constituted in such and such a way, for being in these circumstances, in this environment. The fatality of our essence cannot be separated from the fatality of all that was and will be.

The ascetic ideal has an aim - this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it