Quotes About Purpose

Do you think I bring any child into the world to live for himself alone?

No," said Erskine of Dun. "Come naked of creed or of kind or even of purpose, but bring with you what Orkney saw, all those years ago. We are too small a nation to be able to spare saints to Rome or Geneva, or any other refugees seeking to glorify either the flesh or the spirit. There is no one to understand us, except ourselves." "That I know," said Francis Crawford.

Men live, not while they breathe, but while they live well.

Is it for this thou wast created? You were wrong, Jerott, wrong; and Sybilla was right. Every day, every hour he lived mattered. He belonged to life: it should have been granted him.

You had good reason to hate me. I always understood that. I don't know why you should think differently now, but take care. Don't build up another false image. I may be the picturesque sufferer now, but when I have the whip-hold, I shall behave quite as crudely, or worse. I have no pretty faults. Only, sometimes, a purpose.

How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction?

He is beautiful, and whole, and has learned to offer the world a humble and desperate obedience. You called him a pawn. He has begun to follow his trade.

It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality

But this was exactly the age, she thought, when life ought to be spent, not hoarded. There had been enough years of comfortable living, and complacency was nothing but delusion. One could not always change the world, she felt, but one could change oneself.

even if you are a token, you have an important function to fulfill.

But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose, said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain? You can usually tell, said Miss de Vine, by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.

A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

I do know the worst sin--perhaps the only sin--passion can commit, is to be joyless.

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

So many things in this life are a waste of time

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

But once you've got the How, the Why drives it home.

She had written what she felt herself called upon to write; and, though she was beginning to feel that she might perhaps do this thing better, she had no doubt that the thing itself was the right thing for her. It had overmastered her without her knowledge or notice, and that was the proof of its mastery.

I'm sure one should do one's own job, however trivial, and not persuade one's self into doing somebody else's, however noble.

If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true, Then on the world I may blazon my mark; And what if I don't, and what if I do?

I just lost all my strength of purpose - maybe the maid will find it on the floor in the morning.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?