Purposes Quotes

A zealot is a person who, having forgotten his original purpose, redoubles his efforts.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

The definition of a fanatic is a man who redoubles his efforts after he has forgotten the purpose of his struggle.

Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose … Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom.

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others

No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved.

It is a useless life that is not consecrated to a great ideal.

The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him.

Oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s Country no better than if one had never lived for it.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

I know this country well enough to know that it can’t sustain a conflict if people do not believe in the purposes.

I do not see my election of 1976 or my defeat in 1980 in the narrow focus of God's will for this specific event. I believe He has a purpose for individual lives as well as for the sweep of human events. He works out those purposes in ways far beyond our understanding. I was His in 1976. I am His in 1980. Now, let's go eat supper.

The primary purpose of organized society is to enable everybody to get a living.

What are we here for, save to help each other, to love each other, to uplift each other?

Our purpose is to abolish war and bloodshed from the face of the earth

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good—nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

The just man and firm of purpose—not the heat of fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, not presence of threatening tyrant can shake—in his rocklike soul.

Organized into a movement or state and motivated by a cause that gives them passion and purpose, practitioners of political evil are capable of carrying out violence on levels that far surpass those realizable by any lone individual.

Men are not flattered by being shown that there is a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.