Purpose Quotes

"Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now."

"Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."

"I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents."

"Life isn't just about taking in oxygen and letting out carbon dioxide."

"People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it."

"My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation that was not based on my inner conviction."

"Whatever my individual desires were to be free, I was not alone. There were many others who felt the same way."

"Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire."

"Purpose = The organization’s fundamental reasons for existence beyond simply making money – a perpetual guiding star on the horizon, not to be confused with specific goals or business strategies p. 73"

"The world only concerns me in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years."

"Happiness is a byproduct of being useful. When you help others through your work, you find a deeper meaning."

"He who acts with a constant view to his own advantage will be much murmured against."

"Be the architect of your environment, not the victim of it."

"If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. p. 67 in the 1959 Beacon Press edition"

"If you find in yourself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that you were made for another world."

"Victory belongs to those who are willing to do what the defeated would not."

"[I]f it's just you, attempting to come up with a "good idea" before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation. Ch. 3"

"Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it."

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

"I decided I’m only going to do things that I want to do, and I’m going to do them for the fun of it."

"The pressure to be 'visible' online creates a performance anxiety that drains our creative energy."

"Act without expectation."

"The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains."

"Let him that would move the world, first move himself."

"Your job is not just to do what your parents say, or what your teachers say, but to figure out what your heart says."

"Put enthusiasm into your work."

"Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."

"You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible."

"The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free."

"The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things. p. 455"

"The other reason is that what happens to the individual is a cause of well-being in what directs the world--of its well-being, its fulfillment, or its very existence, even. Because the whole is damaged if you cut away anything--anything at all--from its continuity and its coherence. Not only its parts, but its purposes. And that's what you're doing when you complain: hacking and destroying. (Hays translation) V, 7"

"No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like. The most essential step in the marketing of personal services is that of selecting an occupation into which you can throw yourself wholeheartedly. p. 87"

"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."