Quotes about Purpose

And yet we spend so much time and effort and energy on those résumé entries—entries that lose all significance as soon as our heart stops beating.

Why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things that our eulogies will never cover?

There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if—as the poet Rumi put it—everything is rigged in our favor.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids

Purpose is a desire for something in our own power, coupled with an investigation into its means.

If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.

Happiness consists in the consciousness of a life in which the highest Virtue is actively manifested.

Nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain.

If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.