Motivational Quotes

Purpose

If you don't stand up for something, you may fall for anything.

- Brown, Les

Best Quotes about Purpose

It's not so much how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is praised. The mosquito is swatted.

O'Connor, Mary

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Eliot, George

If you don't stand up for something, you may fall for anything.

Brown, Les

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

Carnegie, Dale

A purpose you impart is no longer your own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

For I say unto you in all sadness of conviction that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone -- when you have felt around you are a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and despair have trusted to your own unshaken will -- then only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought -- the subtle rapture of postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army. And if this joy should not be yours, still it is only thus you can know that you have done what lay in you to do -- can say that you have lived, and be ready for the end.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.

Gide, Andre

What we determine we often break. Purpose is but the slave to memory.

Shakespeare, William

Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high purpose. Power undirected by high purpose spells calamity, and high purpose by itself is utterly useless if the power to put it into effect is lacking.

Roosevelt, Theodore

11.

The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder -- waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life, and, having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

Be the business never so painful, you may have it done for money.

Fuller, Thomas

13.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right.

Schulz, Charles M.

14.

Many people flounder about in life because they do not have a purpose, an objective toward which to work.

Halas, George

15.

Nothing can resist the human will that will stake even its existence on its stated purpose.

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

What we must try to be, of course, is ourselves and wholeheartedly. We must find out what we really are and what we really want.

Boswell, Nelson

17.

Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.

Thurber, James

18.

There is no better test of a man's work than time, which also reveals the thoughts which lay hidden in his breast.

Simonides

19.

Give me a man who says, This one thing I do, and not, These fifty things, I dabble in.

Moody, Dwight L.

20.

Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

Cowper, William

21.

A pilgrim is a wanderer with purpose.

Pilgrim, Peace

22.

How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become -- to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

23.

Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward toward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Bible

24.

Only conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ; so that whether I come and see you or remain absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel. [Philippians 1:27]

Bible

25.

The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.

Cousins, Norman

26.

Make sure the thing you're living for is worth dying for.

Mayes, Charles

27.

The presence of a long-term, conscious goal has helped me maintain stability through the ubiquitous changes of over half a century.

Craig Mary

28.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

Ustinov, Peter

29.

The aims of life are the best defense against death.

Levi, Primo

30.

Don't become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.

Ziglar, Zig

31.

Blessed are the single-hearted, for they shall enjoy much peace. If you refuse to be hurried and pressed, if you stay your soul on God, nothing can keep you from that clearness of spirit which is life and peace. In that stillness you will know what His will is.

Carmichael, Amy

32.

Every person above the ordinary has a certain mission that they are called to fulfill.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

Ordinary people think merely of spending time. Great people think of using it.

34.

If we don't stand for something, we may fall for anything.

35.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

Thurber, James

36.

What mankind wants is not talent; it is purpose.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

37.

The whole life is but a point of time; let us enjoy it, therefore, while it lasts, and not spend it to no purpose.

Plutarch

38.

You can come to understand your purpose in life by slowing down and feeling your heart's desires.

Wieder, Marcia

39.

Man becomes greater in proportion to knowing himself and his faculties. Let him become conscious of what he is and he will soon also learn what he should be.

Schelling, Felix E.

40.

It is essential that we enable young people to see themselves as participants in one of the most exciting eras in history, and to have a sense of purpose in relation to it.

Rockefeller, Nelson

41.

He who clings to life shall lose it -- but losing it in a right cause will gain it.

42.

One thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek: That I may dwell in the house f the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple. [Psalms 27:4]

Bible

43.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

Hoffer, Eric

45.

Your cause belongs to those that can avenge your wrongs.

Winkworth

46.

The only way you can be successful on a post or win at it is to be at cause over it.

Hubbard, L. Ron

47.

Everything in the universe has a purpose. Indeed, the invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion is also flowing through you.

Dyer, Wayne

48.

Winners are people with definite purpose in life.

Waitley, Denis

49.

Many men go fishing their entire lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.

Thoreau, Henry David

50.

The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.

Machiavelli, Niccolo