Purpose quotes
3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside purpose — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Conscious of our many problems, I seek today to lay a foundation to our public policy. My fundamental purpose is to devote my term of office to raising the standard of public service in New Jersey."
"The purpose of life is not to maintain personal comfort; it's to grow the soul."
"A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science."
"I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me."
"The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. All business activities must be focused on this central purpose."
"Mere thinking cannot reveal to us the highest purpose."
"We scientists, whose tragic destination has been to help in making the methods of annihilation more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented."
"A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism."
"For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect."
"Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study."
"In the absence of any short term in common use to represent all desirable things, or things that satisfy human wants, we may use the term Goods for that purpose."
"But if inventions have increased man's power over nature very much, then the real value of money is better measured for some purposes in labour than in commodities."
"It has been handed down in mythical form from earliest times to posterity, that there are gods, and that the divine (Deity) compasses all nature. All beside this has been added, after the mythical style, for the purpose of persuading the multitude, and for the interests of the laws, and the advantage of the state."
"In the works of Nature, purpose, not accident, is the main thing."
"It is horrible, yet fascinating, this struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame."
"Moving ourselves to the background and others to the foreground is evidence that the (spiritual) search is achieving its purpose."
"Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter."
"There is a voice in the Universe urging us to remember our purpose for being on this great Earth. This is the voice of inspiration, which is within each and every one of us."
"All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence."
"Do not for one repulse, forego the purpose That you resolved to effect."
