Quotes about Purpose
God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with.
— Henry Ward Beecher
It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people.
— H Richard Niebuhr
A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been.
— Hamilton Wright Mabie
The mysterious character of providence, which does not stop at simply steering things "in general", but precisely pursues the individual, that which is distinguished from everything else, and dwells in the whole confusing particularity of the world.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
What you are is god's gift to you, What you make of yourself is your gift to god.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
Suffering comes to ennoble man, to purge his thoughts of pride and superficiality, to expand his horizons. In sum, the purpose of suffering is to repair that which is faulty in a man's personality.
— Harold S. Kushner
What can we do, and what role, if any, can religion play in helping us? I would reiterate two important points: (1) The purpose of religion is not to explain God or to please God, but to help us meet some of our most basic human needs. (2) Religion helps us not by changing the facts, but by teaching us new ways of looking at those facts.
— Harold S. Kushner
When he thought he was doing something that made a difference to people, he could bear any burden [Moses]. When he lost that sense of achievement, he became too discouraged to keep on doing the hard things.
— Harold S. Kushner
God's role is to give us the vision to know what we need to do, to bless us with the qualities of soul that we will need in order to do them ourselves, no matter how hard they may be, and to accompany us on that journey.
— Harold S. Kushner
True success consists not in becoming the person you dreamed of being when you were young, but in becoming the person you were meant to be, the person you are capable of being when you are at your best.
— Harold S. Kushner
More than any other human problem, loneliness, the absence of meaningful human connection, drains the joy and the sense of purpose from our lives.
— Harold S. Kushner
We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be.
— Harold S. Kushner