Quotes about Purpose

There's a particular kind of people I despise. Those who seek some higher purpose or 'universal goal', those who do not know what to live for, who moan that they 'must find themselves.' You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I think it would be the most shameful one.

Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find.

Thought - he told himself quietly - is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

There was no action she could take against the men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them—nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer?

to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that

The man who has no purpose, but has to act, acts to destroy others. That is not the same thing as a productive or creative purpose.

Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or 'universal goal,' who don't know what to live for, who moan that they must 'find themselves.' You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I'd think it would be the most shameful one.

It's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

The American story has never been about things coming easy. It has been about rising to the moment when the moment is hard. About rejecting panicked division for purposeful unity. About seeing a mountaintop from the deepest valley. That is why we remember that some of the most famous words ever spoken by an American came from a president who took office in a time of turmoil: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

How many of us are tested in that way, asked to risk careers we've long dreamed of in the service of some greater good?

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you,' he said, 'by the grace of God.' (Walter Brueggemann)