Quotes About Purpose

How can you bear to be so contemptible, when others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be done–how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is useful?

For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective.

I fear that in this thing many rich people deceive themselves. They go on accumulating the means but never using them; making bricks, but never building.

He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

Direction! I know very well what you mean by direction. When there's a bigger maggot than usual in your head you call it 'direction

Only those who know the supremacy of intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

He leaped over the years in this way, and, in the haste of strong purpose and strong desire, did not see how they would be made up of slow days, hours, and minutes.

I used to think I could never bear life if it kept on being the same every day, and I must always be doing things of no consequence and never know anything greater.

Have not men, shut up in solitary imprisonment, found an interest in marking the moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles, has become a mastering purpose? Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

I have serious things to do now. I have a living to give away.

H]e was in another sort of contemplative mood perhaps more common in the young men of our day — that of questioning whether it were worth while to take part in the battle of the world: I mean, of course, the young men in whom the unproductive labor of questioning is sustained by three or five per cent on capital which somebody else has battled for.

He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

It's all I've got to think of now—to do my work well and make the world a bit better place for them as can enjoy it.

That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it. Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then into a larger square; and every added guinea, while it was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire

What should I do—how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

George Harrison

Beware of sadness It can hit you It can hurt you Make you sore and what is more That is not what you are here for.

Even if it's being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it's still only a temporary thing.

Be Beware of sadness It can hit you It can hurt you Make you sore and what is more That is not what we are here for.

Everyone's Got To Be Somewhere.

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there

That really is strange when you consider the whole planet, and all the planets there may be on the physical level...how do I come to that family in that house at that time and who am I anyway?

The shortest answer is doing.

Epictetus, for example, asks us to think of the deity as the playwright who assigns us roles. Our business in life is to play admirably the role assigned to us.