Quotes About Purpose

39 quotes

Marcus Aurelius held that even the least of our activities ought to have some end in view. Lewis Carroll showed the opposite case: when Alice tells the Cat she does not know where she is going, the Cat replies that then it doesn't matter which way she goes. David Hume observed that purpose, intention and design strike even the most careless thinker.

Rumi gave purpose a practical shape: be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder, and help someone's soul heal. Martin Luther King Jr. defined power itself as the ability to achieve purpose and to effect change. Agatha Christie described the restless kind of purpose that has not yet found its object, wanting to go everywhere and do everything in order to find something. George Washington allowed looking back only to derive useful lessons from past errors. Marcel Proust gave the bleakest answer about one purpose in particular: happiness, he wrote, serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
English novelist and social critic

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.

— David Copperfield

English mystery and detective writer

I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that's it, I want to find something.

— Endless Night

American Baptist minister and civil rights leader

We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to effect change, and we need power.

— The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Florentine poet, writer, and philosopher

If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

— The Divine Comedy

Russian author

One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.''But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...''Life won't leave one alone as it is.

— War and Peace

German-born theoretical physicist

Man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.

French novelist, critic and essayist

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

President of the United States from 1861 to 1865

You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.

Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.

Spanish painter and sculptor

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

28th President of the United States

You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world.

Russian, French, and American composer

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

French philosopher, author, and journalist

We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

American author and humorist

Life itself is only a vision, a dream.""Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space--and you!

— The Mysterious Stranger

English modernist writer

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

— Mrs. Dalloway

German philosopher

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

— Parerga and Paralipomena

Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

— Ficciones

Dutch painter

My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth.

— The Letters of Vincent van Gogh