Quotes About Purpose

I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

Though a living cannot be made from art, art makes life worth living. It makes starving, living.

Nature is not tailored to man. It exists for itself.

To be—what? What to be? That is the question.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence, and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: On the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself, an ideal end. Aiming thus, at something else, they find happiness, by the way.

You have to absolutely love what you are doing or you will become a slave to it.

Whereas in the past a worker lived in his or her work, he or she now works in order to live outside his or her work.

Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.

I realized that, like it or not, this odd group of people constituted my family, and I had things I should be doing so I could feel more worthy of them.

Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming at something else, they find happiness by the way.

Those only are happy .... who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness, "a crisis in my mental history

But I now thought that this end [one's happiness] was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness[....] Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way[....] Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

One person with a belief is equal to the foce of 100,000 who have only interests.

To define, is to select from among all the properties of a thing, those which shall be understood to be designated and declared by its name; and the properties must be well known to us before we can be competent to determine which of them are fittest to be chosen for this purpose.

Growing up, I was encouraged to get a good education, get a real job doing something I enjoyed, and, should the opportunity present itself, consider public service as just that: a chance to serve, not an end in itself.

John J. Raskob was likewise floundering. Although he had enough money to do nothing more than laze about in the Palm Beach sun, he was not happy unless his time was fully occupied.

Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not failing. On the contrary, they are spectacularly successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what they have been intended to do since their inception.

Institutional goals, however sane and well-intentioned, are unable to harmonize deeply with the uniqueness of individual human goals.

Nearly a century ago a French sociologist wrote that every institution's unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has nominally staked out for itself.

Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn't an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life.

Free will allows infinite numbers of human stories to be written in which a personal you is the main character. The sciences, on the other hand, hard or soft, assume that purpose and free will are hogwash; given enough data, everything will be seen as explainable, predetermined, and predictable.