Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.
- Edward Abbey
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
- Edward Abbey
Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
- Chinua Achebe
The chief purpose of life, for any of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.
- J R R Tolkien
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.
- Mortimer Adler
The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
- David Viscott
The purpose of all war is peace.
- Augustine Of Hippo
Human life is something that comes to us from beyond this world, and the purpose of our society is to cherish it and to enable the individual to attain the highest achievement of which he is capable
- Harry S Truman
Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.
- Harry S Truman
After all, that was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.
- Robert Aickman
knowing that the purpose of this promis is simply to make parting easier
-Aleph
- Paulo Coelho
No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people's eyes, to reveal the marvels around.
- Paulo Coelho
Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally--break them apart?
- Jodi Picoult
The purpose of human life and the sense of happiness is to give the maximum what the man is able to give.
- Alexander Alekhine
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
- Paul Valery
According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. this is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile--just for the chance to experience this infinite love. And once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can...bliss.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
- A R Ammons
To make a difference is just... I think... the purpose of what life is.
- Anastacia
The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.
- Thomas Jefferson
Three conditions are necessary for Penance: contrition, which is sorrow for sin, together with a purpose of amendment; confession of sins without any omission; and satisfaction by means of good works.
- Thomas Aquinas
The purpose of the latest series of intellectual meetings, which were held in various parlors in Concord, was to talk about Reconstruction with objectivity, sensibility, and a lack of prejudice. As everyone had expected, the meetings were far from objective, seldom sensible, and never unprejudiced.
- Lisa Kleypas
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
- Aristotle
The purpose of all wars, is peace.
- Saint Augustine
The purpose of fear is to raise your awareness not to stop your progress.
- Steve Maraboli
The purpose of empowerment is to urge you towards freedom, to help each of you to break free of all limitations. It is that freedom that will give you eternal happiness and finally connect you with the unconditional realization of TRUTH.
- Steve Maraboli
The true purpose of education is to teach a man to carry himself triumphant to the sunset.
- Liberty Hyde Bailey
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
- James Baldwin
They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record.
- Lester Bangs
To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.
- Muriel Barbery
The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.
- Muriel Barbery
Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.
- Muriel Barbery
They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.
- John Perry Barlow
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
- Julian Barnes
Could you please stop with the beating? (Kat)
He's being punished. Hello? This is Tartarus, remember the purpose of this part of the Underworld? We're not really warm and fluffy over here. (Hades)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
At the start, we tried to be calm and objective, but that soon fell away, and the purpose of the speakers was to goad the listeners into wanting to read the book themselves. Once two members had read the same book, they could argue, which was our great delight. We read books, talked books, argued over books, and became dearer and dearer to one another.
- Mary Ann Shaffer
I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.
- Dave Barry
The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.
- Bernard Baruch
A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
- Henry Ward Beecher
Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.
- Albert Camus
The purpose of Plan Columbia was to deal with the increased cultivation and illegal activity associated with that cultivation concerning narco trafficking in Columbia.
- Rand Beers
The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
- Ruth Benedict
It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
- Walter Benjamin
It is the purpose of government to see that not only the legitimate interests of the few are protected but that the welfare and rights of the many are conserved.
- Franklin D Roosevelt
For the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)
- Wendell Berry
The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.
- Aneurin Bevan
Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.
- Ambrose Bierce
All revolutions are spiritual at the source. All my activities have the sole purpose of achieving a union of hearts.
- Vinoba Bhave
The purpose of The Motherhood Manifesto is mothers really need to be given the ability to parent.
- Joan Blades
The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.
- David Boies
The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.
- Edward De Bono
But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
- William Shakespeare
The main purpose of Social Security is to redistribute wealth, to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on government for their basic needs in their retirement years.
- Neal Boortz
The principal purpose of the Democratic Party is to use the force of government to take property away from the people who earn it and give it to people who do not.
- Neal Boortz
One's 'thing'--(1) A point of personal interest; a hobby, sport, or avocation that succinctly defines a person. (2) A brief coupling of words used to evoke someone's personality in a small-talk setting: Billy's thing used to be soccer; now it's masterbation. (3) A laconic summation of one's character and interests used for the purpose of categorization and judgement. See also 'What do you do?
- Joshua Braff
What did you put in the fire?" Kaladin said. "To make that special smoke?"
"Nothing. It was just and ordinary fire."
"But, I saw-"
"What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind."
"What does the story mean, then?"
"It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think , but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.
- Brandon Sanderson
The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.
- Brandon Sanderson
The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.
- Madeleine L Engle
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
- Ashleigh Brilliant
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
- Marshall Mcluhan
the universe has a place and purpose for everything and everyone. sometimes we cannot know what that place is. or what the purpose of everything that happens to us will be. that is why we must allow the natural order of things to occur.
- Jessica Brody
The very purpose of our life is to seek happiness.
- Dalai Lama
One great question underlies our experience, whether we think about it or not: what is the purpose of life?... From the moment of birth every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering. Neither social conditioning nor education nor ideology affects this. From the very core of our being, we simply desire contentment... Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.
- Dalai Lama
The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness.
- Dalai Lama
I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in that religion or this religion, we are all seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness..
- Dalai Lama
The purpose of all the major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts.
- Dalai Lama
The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
- Dalai Lama
To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright
- Bill Bryson
That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO
- Chuck Palahniuk
It's not true that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. At least, not all of it. Some of your life might flash. Other portions of your life it might take you years and years to recall. That, I think, is the function of Hell: It's a place of remembering. Beyond that, the purpose of Hell is not so much to forget the details of our lives as it is to forgive them.
- Chuck Palahniuk
The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.
- Mahatma Gandhi
A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
- Mahatma Gandhi
The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which business renders.
- Leo Burnett
The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.
- William S Burroughs
The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to ensure the unhindered development of the individual.
- Albert Einstein
The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
- Emily Giffin
The sole/soul purpose of a book is to be read.
- Dani J Caile
The Child Custody Protection Act makes it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of obtaining an abortion.
- Ken Calvert
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
- Gilbert K Chesterton
There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant.
- Gilbert K Chesterton
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)
- Bernard Malamud
The purpose of money was to purchase one's freedom to pursue that which is useful and interesting.
- Benjamin Franklin
Ultimately, the purpose of magic is to free our potential, not bind us to ideas.
- Philip Carr Gomm
It is the purpose of the majority of the Immigration Committee to encourage assimilation, yet this bill has already done more than anything I know of to bring about discord among our resident aliens.
- Emanuel Celler
I've always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that its merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense.
- Elizabeth George
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
- Marian Wright Edelman
True inner joy is self-created.
It does not depend on outer circumstances.
A river is flowing in and through you carrying the message of joy.
This divine joy is the sole purpose of life.
- Sri Chinmoy
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
- Nadine Gordimer
We cannot suppose therefore that God has made an order of beings, with such mental qualities and powers, for the sole purpose of being used as beasts, or instruments of labour.
- Thomas Clarkson
The purpose of this study is to offer a logical, practical, pragmatic proof of the existence of God from a purely scientific perspective.
- John Clayton
The danger of what's happening right now in terms of using reconciliation is, the purpose of the Senate is going to be defeated. And that is to bring consensus to big issues in this country so that we have a reasoned and thoughtful approach and that the American public buys into it.
- Tom Coburn
The purpose of this lectchoor is to let you know where we are. We are in the deep cack. It couldn't be worse if it was raining arseholes. Any questions?
- Terry Pratchett
But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.
- Terry Pratchett
No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable
- Terry Pratchett
Waitress: "And to drink?"
Artemis: "Spring water. Irish, if you have it. And no ice, please. As your ice is no doubt made from tap water, which rather defeats the purpose of spring water.
- Eoin Colfer
The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.
- Jim Collins
They believed their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean- except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions.
- Joseph Conrad
Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.
- James F Cooper
The purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature--all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn't care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal's behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes exinct.
- Michael Crichton
The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.
- Michael Crichton
For anyone who feels lost in their own way, going back to who you are and what you love or moving forward to whoever you are meant to be or meant to love, is the purpose of being lost. We lose ourselves, so we can find out who we truly are. And when by fate we do, we discover the best version of ourselves.
- Joanne Crisner
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
- Quentin Crisp
Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
But we have to ask ourselves, what's the purpose of the stock market? It's supposed to be a source of capital for growing business. It's lost that purpose.
- Mark Cuban
The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.
- Will Cuppy
There are some who deploy casual wisdom for the purpose of engaging.
- Santosh Kalwar
The purpose of man is like the purpose of a pollywog - to wiggle along as far as he can without dying; or, to hang to life until death takes him.
- Clarence Darrow
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
- Kurt Vonnegut
You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.
- Kurt Vonnegut
What is the purpose of life?...To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!
- Kurt Vonnegut
It's about getting a more democratic Wales for the purpose of improving our economic performance, for improving the delivery of health care, for raising educational standards.
- Ron Davies
I've moved about 10 times over the past 15 years. I don't move for the sole purpose of getting rid of stuff. I'm not crazy. I also move so that I never have to wash any windows.
- Ellen Degeneres
Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. (101)
- Don Delillo
In the early ages, I believe not much thought was given to what man is and what his real functions should be, and what is the real purpose of his life.
- Morarji Desai
To finalize, the purpose of an election is to hear the will of the people, not to fabricate votes.
- Lincoln Diazbalart
She forgot to be shy at the moment, in honestly warning him away
from the sunken wreck he had a dream of raising; and looked at him
with eyes which assuredly, in association with her patient face,
her fragile figure, her spare dress, and the wind and rain, did not
turn him from his purpose of helping her.
- Charles Dickens
I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you[for helping me]. I almost feel as if You ought to be grateful to ME, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity... I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you, by giving you an opportunity of assisting me.
- Charles Dickens
During the past 30 years, European governments have provided more than $15 billion in the form of low- and no-cost loans to Airbus for the specific purpose of developing new aircraft lines.
- Norm Dicks
The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.
- Franz Kafka
Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built.
- James C Dobson
The reason why I consider myself a clever man is simply because I could never in my life finish anything I'd started. All right, I am a talker, a harmless, boring talker as we all are. But what can I do if the direct and sole purpose of every intelligent man is to talk, that is to say, to waste his time deliberately?
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Without a firm idea of himself and the purpose of his life, man cannot live, and would sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if he was surrounded by bread.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It seems to me that if there were such a man, for example, as would seize a red-hot bar of iron and clutch it in his hand, with the purpose of measuring his strength of mind, and in the course of ten seconds would be overcoming the intolerable pain and would finally overcome it, this man, it seems to me, would endure something like what was experience now, in these ten seconds, by Nikolai Vsevolodovich.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power.
- Nick Drake
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
- Peter Drucker
The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
- Milan Kundera
The search for the purpose of life has puzzled people for thousands of years. That's because we typically begin at the wrong starting pointourselves. We ask self-centered questions like What do I want to be? What should I do with my life? What are my goals, my ambitions, my dreams for my future? But focusing on ourselves will never reveal our life's purpose.
- Rick Warren
In Psalm 72, Solomon prays for power and fame but he says the purpose of influence is to speak up for others and one is the immigrant. He doesn't delineate between legal and illegal.
- Rick Warren
If I wanted so much to go-- if everything I wanted in the whole world was on the other side of that door, why didn't I just go?... What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me? In a words, what the hell was going on?
- Elaine Dundy
You know, the purpose of reconciliation is to avoid the filibuster. The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.
- Dick Durbin
The purpose of dancing isn't to end up at a particular spot on the floor. The purpose of dancing and of life is to enjoy every moment and every step, regardless of where you are when the music ends.
- Wayne Dyer
You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?
- Freeman Dyson
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
- Umberto Eco
Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
- Martin Luther King Jr
There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
- Barbara Ehrenreich
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
- Albert Schweitzer
Everyone must work to live, but the purpose of life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others. Only then have we ourselves become true human beings.
- Albert Schweitzer
The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.
- Robert Kennedy
I always thought the purpose of time was to move forward, not backward.
- Michelle Moran
The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino. - Joe Fox
- Nora Ephron
Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
- Annie Ernaux
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
- William Faulkner
The purpose of the UN mechanism, this inspection mechanism, is not to engage in a cat and mouse game with Saddam Hussein and try to find weapons that the Iraqi government is working on concealing.
- Douglas Feith
Keep it in tune with the times, but don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways to make money.
- Dorothy Fields
Studies indicate that these children are more susceptible to advertising and even less likely to understand the purpose of this advertising.
- Bob Filner
Don't confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.
- Martin Henry Fischer
The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!
- Michael Flanders
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
- Gustave Flaubert
There is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them. And adding additional information is like adding a foot to Mount Everest.
- Ari Fleischer
I was proud to share the stories of my friends at Georgetown Law who have suffered dire medical consequences because our student insurance does not cover contraception for the purpose of preventing pregnancy.
- Sandra Fluke
When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, "To mourn," and then, "To mourn try to live," he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, "Neither." "For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?" "For as long as I can." "Are we talking about a weekend or a year?" I didn't write anything. The man said, "Next.
- Jonathan Safran Foer
... the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, 'To mourn,' and then, 'To try to live,' he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, 'Neither.' 'For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?' I wrote, 'For the rest of my life.
- Jonathan Safran Foer
The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- Malcolm Forbes
Everything I've always done has been for the sole purpose of increasing my lovemaking output. A lot of guys won't admit that, but I do. I just want to make love.
- Rick Fox
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
- Anatole France
An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.
- Viktor E Frankl
Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
- Jonathan Franzen
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
- Sigmund Freud
Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.
- Eduardo Galeano
Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
- Leo Tolstoy
You are here to enable the divine purpose of the Universe to unfold. That is how important you are!
- Eckhart Tolle
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. ... The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.
- Eckhart Tolle
All my stories were usually titled, 'White House Says,' 'President Bush Wants,' and I relied on transcripts from the briefings. I relied on press releases that were sent to the press for the purpose of accurately portraying what the White House believed or wanted.
- Jeff Gannon
If you agree to work for us, half the time you won't know the purpose of your duties... and when we do explain, we might not be telling the truth. But that's the real world, folks ..
- James Alan Gardner
It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life its facility, its use.
- William H Gass
But what we're determined to do, and what the reforms will do is to make sure this system goes back to its core purpose of taking the savings of Americans and from investors around the world and allocating those to people with an idea, not just the largest companies in the country, but to small businesses with an idea and a plan for growing.
- Timothy Geithner
The purpose of debates is to explore issues, not end them.
- David Gemmell
The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.
- Thomas Hardy
What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority. If voters care about parking lots, then talk about parking lots.
- Newt Gingrich
I think to close half of Magic Kingdom for the purpose of a White House invitation town hall meeting on a phony main street on behalf of a phony president just strikes me as weird.
- Newt Gingrich
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
- Emma Goldman
It is not the purpose of the ad or commercial to make the reader or listener say, 'My what a clever ad.' It is the purpose of advertising to make the reader say, 'I believe I'll buy one when I'm shopping tomorrow'.
- Morris Hite
If part of the purpose of making an album is to get some radio play, then you might as well think about that. But that's not really how we picked the songs.
- Mike Gordon
...there began to come to her a first dim realization of God's humility. Rejected by the proud in His own right by what humble means He chose to succor them; through the spirit of a child, a poor gypsy or an old man, by a song perhaps, or even it might be by the fall of a leaf or the scent of a flower. For His infinite and humble patience nothing was too small to advance His purpose of salvation and eternity was not too long for its accomplishment.
- Elizabeth Goudge
The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.
- Juan Goytisolo
We need to be celebrating those who serve us rather than mocking them for the purpose of getting on TV and selling some books.
- Jennifer M Granholm
the purpose of art is to provide what the world cannot.
- Tom Robbins
The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.
- Tom Robbins
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
- Franz Grillparzer
We have to remember we're in a global economy. The purpose of fiscal stimulus is not simply to sustain activity in our national economies, but to help the global economy as well, and that's why it's so critical that measures in those packages avoid anything that smacks of protectionism.
- Stephen Harper
There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.
- Sam Harris
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
- Sydney J Harris
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.
- Sydney J Harris
I believe that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
- William Henry Harrison
All the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
- William Henry Harrison
I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
- William Henry Harrison
Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a point where you could not go back, whereas the stories changedit transformed you, too.
- Ursula Hegi
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
- William Saroyan
He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.
- Chaim Potok
I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.
- Barbara Hepworth
The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them.
- Auberon Herbert
The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.
- Frank Herbert
All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more strongly the truths come from on high, and contained in the sacred writings.
- William Herschel
The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song.
Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel
The 2 million people who work in the NHS and social care are also themselves patients and users. I know they all want to treat patients and users the way they and their families would want to be treated and that is the purpose of our reforms.
- Patricia Hewitt
As we got closer to marriage, I felt completely confident that Gordon loved me. But I also knew somehow that I would never come first with him. I knew I was going to be second in his life and that the Lord was going to be first. And that was okay. It seemed to me that if you understood the gospel and the purpose of our being here, you would want a husband who put the Lord first.
- Marjorie Pay Hinckley
It is my faith and conviction that the Constitution came not alone of the brain and purpose of man, but of the inspiration of God.
- Gordon B Hinckley
Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.
- Richard Holloway
The purpose of Knowledge is to create a doorway which leads to the Truth
- Misha Hoo
The purpose of my life is being a father to my kids and being a husband to my wife.
- Terrence Howard
- Edward Abbey
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
- Edward Abbey
Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
- Chinua Achebe
The chief purpose of life, for any of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.
- J R R Tolkien
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.
- Mortimer Adler
The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
- David Viscott
The purpose of all war is peace.
- Augustine Of Hippo
Human life is something that comes to us from beyond this world, and the purpose of our society is to cherish it and to enable the individual to attain the highest achievement of which he is capable
- Harry S Truman
Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.
- Harry S Truman
After all, that was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.
- Robert Aickman
knowing that the purpose of this promis is simply to make parting easier
-Aleph
- Paulo Coelho
No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people's eyes, to reveal the marvels around.
- Paulo Coelho
Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally--break them apart?
- Jodi Picoult
The purpose of human life and the sense of happiness is to give the maximum what the man is able to give.
- Alexander Alekhine
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
- Paul Valery
According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. this is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile--just for the chance to experience this infinite love. And once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can...bliss.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
- A R Ammons
To make a difference is just... I think... the purpose of what life is.
- Anastacia
The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.
- Thomas Jefferson
Three conditions are necessary for Penance: contrition, which is sorrow for sin, together with a purpose of amendment; confession of sins without any omission; and satisfaction by means of good works.
- Thomas Aquinas
The purpose of the latest series of intellectual meetings, which were held in various parlors in Concord, was to talk about Reconstruction with objectivity, sensibility, and a lack of prejudice. As everyone had expected, the meetings were far from objective, seldom sensible, and never unprejudiced.
- Lisa Kleypas
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
- Aristotle
The purpose of all wars, is peace.
- Saint Augustine
The purpose of fear is to raise your awareness not to stop your progress.
- Steve Maraboli
The purpose of empowerment is to urge you towards freedom, to help each of you to break free of all limitations. It is that freedom that will give you eternal happiness and finally connect you with the unconditional realization of TRUTH.
- Steve Maraboli
The true purpose of education is to teach a man to carry himself triumphant to the sunset.
- Liberty Hyde Bailey
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
- James Baldwin
They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record.
- Lester Bangs
To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.
- Muriel Barbery
The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.
- Muriel Barbery
Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.
- Muriel Barbery
They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.
- John Perry Barlow
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
- Julian Barnes
Could you please stop with the beating? (Kat)
He's being punished. Hello? This is Tartarus, remember the purpose of this part of the Underworld? We're not really warm and fluffy over here. (Hades)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
At the start, we tried to be calm and objective, but that soon fell away, and the purpose of the speakers was to goad the listeners into wanting to read the book themselves. Once two members had read the same book, they could argue, which was our great delight. We read books, talked books, argued over books, and became dearer and dearer to one another.
- Mary Ann Shaffer
I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.
- Dave Barry
The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.
- Bernard Baruch
A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
- Henry Ward Beecher
Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.
- Albert Camus
The purpose of Plan Columbia was to deal with the increased cultivation and illegal activity associated with that cultivation concerning narco trafficking in Columbia.
- Rand Beers
The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
- Ruth Benedict
It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
- Walter Benjamin
It is the purpose of government to see that not only the legitimate interests of the few are protected but that the welfare and rights of the many are conserved.
- Franklin D Roosevelt
For the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)
- Wendell Berry
The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.
- Aneurin Bevan
Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.
- Ambrose Bierce
All revolutions are spiritual at the source. All my activities have the sole purpose of achieving a union of hearts.
- Vinoba Bhave
The purpose of The Motherhood Manifesto is mothers really need to be given the ability to parent.
- Joan Blades
The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.
- David Boies
The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.
- Edward De Bono
But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
- William Shakespeare
The main purpose of Social Security is to redistribute wealth, to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on government for their basic needs in their retirement years.
- Neal Boortz
The principal purpose of the Democratic Party is to use the force of government to take property away from the people who earn it and give it to people who do not.
- Neal Boortz
One's 'thing'--(1) A point of personal interest; a hobby, sport, or avocation that succinctly defines a person. (2) A brief coupling of words used to evoke someone's personality in a small-talk setting: Billy's thing used to be soccer; now it's masterbation. (3) A laconic summation of one's character and interests used for the purpose of categorization and judgement. See also 'What do you do?
- Joshua Braff
What did you put in the fire?" Kaladin said. "To make that special smoke?"
"Nothing. It was just and ordinary fire."
"But, I saw-"
"What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind."
"What does the story mean, then?"
"It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think , but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.
- Brandon Sanderson
The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.
- Brandon Sanderson
The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.
- Madeleine L Engle
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
- Ashleigh Brilliant
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
- Marshall Mcluhan
the universe has a place and purpose for everything and everyone. sometimes we cannot know what that place is. or what the purpose of everything that happens to us will be. that is why we must allow the natural order of things to occur.
- Jessica Brody
The very purpose of our life is to seek happiness.
- Dalai Lama
One great question underlies our experience, whether we think about it or not: what is the purpose of life?... From the moment of birth every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering. Neither social conditioning nor education nor ideology affects this. From the very core of our being, we simply desire contentment... Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.
- Dalai Lama
The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness.
- Dalai Lama
I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in that religion or this religion, we are all seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness..
- Dalai Lama
The purpose of all the major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts.
- Dalai Lama
The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
- Dalai Lama
To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright
- Bill Bryson
That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO
- Chuck Palahniuk
It's not true that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. At least, not all of it. Some of your life might flash. Other portions of your life it might take you years and years to recall. That, I think, is the function of Hell: It's a place of remembering. Beyond that, the purpose of Hell is not so much to forget the details of our lives as it is to forgive them.
- Chuck Palahniuk
The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.
- Mahatma Gandhi
A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
- Mahatma Gandhi
The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which business renders.
- Leo Burnett
The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.
- William S Burroughs
The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to ensure the unhindered development of the individual.
- Albert Einstein
The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
- Emily Giffin
The sole/soul purpose of a book is to be read.
- Dani J Caile
The Child Custody Protection Act makes it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of obtaining an abortion.
- Ken Calvert
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
- Gilbert K Chesterton
There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant.
- Gilbert K Chesterton
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)
- Bernard Malamud
The purpose of money was to purchase one's freedom to pursue that which is useful and interesting.
- Benjamin Franklin
Ultimately, the purpose of magic is to free our potential, not bind us to ideas.
- Philip Carr Gomm
It is the purpose of the majority of the Immigration Committee to encourage assimilation, yet this bill has already done more than anything I know of to bring about discord among our resident aliens.
- Emanuel Celler
I've always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that its merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense.
- Elizabeth George
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
- Marian Wright Edelman
True inner joy is self-created.
It does not depend on outer circumstances.
A river is flowing in and through you carrying the message of joy.
This divine joy is the sole purpose of life.
- Sri Chinmoy
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
- Nadine Gordimer
We cannot suppose therefore that God has made an order of beings, with such mental qualities and powers, for the sole purpose of being used as beasts, or instruments of labour.
- Thomas Clarkson
The purpose of this study is to offer a logical, practical, pragmatic proof of the existence of God from a purely scientific perspective.
- John Clayton
The danger of what's happening right now in terms of using reconciliation is, the purpose of the Senate is going to be defeated. And that is to bring consensus to big issues in this country so that we have a reasoned and thoughtful approach and that the American public buys into it.
- Tom Coburn
The purpose of this lectchoor is to let you know where we are. We are in the deep cack. It couldn't be worse if it was raining arseholes. Any questions?
- Terry Pratchett
But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.
- Terry Pratchett
No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable
- Terry Pratchett
Waitress: "And to drink?"
Artemis: "Spring water. Irish, if you have it. And no ice, please. As your ice is no doubt made from tap water, which rather defeats the purpose of spring water.
- Eoin Colfer
The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.
- Jim Collins
They believed their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean- except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions.
- Joseph Conrad
Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.
- James F Cooper
The purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature--all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn't care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal's behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes exinct.
- Michael Crichton
The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.
- Michael Crichton
For anyone who feels lost in their own way, going back to who you are and what you love or moving forward to whoever you are meant to be or meant to love, is the purpose of being lost. We lose ourselves, so we can find out who we truly are. And when by fate we do, we discover the best version of ourselves.
- Joanne Crisner
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
- Quentin Crisp
Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
But we have to ask ourselves, what's the purpose of the stock market? It's supposed to be a source of capital for growing business. It's lost that purpose.
- Mark Cuban
The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.
- Will Cuppy
There are some who deploy casual wisdom for the purpose of engaging.
- Santosh Kalwar
The purpose of man is like the purpose of a pollywog - to wiggle along as far as he can without dying; or, to hang to life until death takes him.
- Clarence Darrow
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
- Kurt Vonnegut
You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.
- Kurt Vonnegut
What is the purpose of life?...To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!
- Kurt Vonnegut
It's about getting a more democratic Wales for the purpose of improving our economic performance, for improving the delivery of health care, for raising educational standards.
- Ron Davies
I've moved about 10 times over the past 15 years. I don't move for the sole purpose of getting rid of stuff. I'm not crazy. I also move so that I never have to wash any windows.
- Ellen Degeneres
Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. (101)
- Don Delillo
In the early ages, I believe not much thought was given to what man is and what his real functions should be, and what is the real purpose of his life.
- Morarji Desai
To finalize, the purpose of an election is to hear the will of the people, not to fabricate votes.
- Lincoln Diazbalart
She forgot to be shy at the moment, in honestly warning him away
from the sunken wreck he had a dream of raising; and looked at him
with eyes which assuredly, in association with her patient face,
her fragile figure, her spare dress, and the wind and rain, did not
turn him from his purpose of helping her.
- Charles Dickens
I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you[for helping me]. I almost feel as if You ought to be grateful to ME, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity... I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you, by giving you an opportunity of assisting me.
- Charles Dickens
During the past 30 years, European governments have provided more than $15 billion in the form of low- and no-cost loans to Airbus for the specific purpose of developing new aircraft lines.
- Norm Dicks
The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.
- Franz Kafka
Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built.
- James C Dobson
The reason why I consider myself a clever man is simply because I could never in my life finish anything I'd started. All right, I am a talker, a harmless, boring talker as we all are. But what can I do if the direct and sole purpose of every intelligent man is to talk, that is to say, to waste his time deliberately?
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Without a firm idea of himself and the purpose of his life, man cannot live, and would sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if he was surrounded by bread.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It seems to me that if there were such a man, for example, as would seize a red-hot bar of iron and clutch it in his hand, with the purpose of measuring his strength of mind, and in the course of ten seconds would be overcoming the intolerable pain and would finally overcome it, this man, it seems to me, would endure something like what was experience now, in these ten seconds, by Nikolai Vsevolodovich.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power.
- Nick Drake
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
- Peter Drucker
The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
- Milan Kundera
The search for the purpose of life has puzzled people for thousands of years. That's because we typically begin at the wrong starting pointourselves. We ask self-centered questions like What do I want to be? What should I do with my life? What are my goals, my ambitions, my dreams for my future? But focusing on ourselves will never reveal our life's purpose.
- Rick Warren
In Psalm 72, Solomon prays for power and fame but he says the purpose of influence is to speak up for others and one is the immigrant. He doesn't delineate between legal and illegal.
- Rick Warren
If I wanted so much to go-- if everything I wanted in the whole world was on the other side of that door, why didn't I just go?... What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me? In a words, what the hell was going on?
- Elaine Dundy
You know, the purpose of reconciliation is to avoid the filibuster. The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.
- Dick Durbin
The purpose of dancing isn't to end up at a particular spot on the floor. The purpose of dancing and of life is to enjoy every moment and every step, regardless of where you are when the music ends.
- Wayne Dyer
You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?
- Freeman Dyson
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
- Umberto Eco
Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
- Martin Luther King Jr
There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
- Barbara Ehrenreich
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
- Albert Schweitzer
Everyone must work to live, but the purpose of life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others. Only then have we ourselves become true human beings.
- Albert Schweitzer
The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.
- Robert Kennedy
I always thought the purpose of time was to move forward, not backward.
- Michelle Moran
The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino. - Joe Fox
- Nora Ephron
Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
- Annie Ernaux
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
- William Faulkner
The purpose of the UN mechanism, this inspection mechanism, is not to engage in a cat and mouse game with Saddam Hussein and try to find weapons that the Iraqi government is working on concealing.
- Douglas Feith
Keep it in tune with the times, but don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways to make money.
- Dorothy Fields
Studies indicate that these children are more susceptible to advertising and even less likely to understand the purpose of this advertising.
- Bob Filner
Don't confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.
- Martin Henry Fischer
The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!
- Michael Flanders
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
- Gustave Flaubert
There is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them. And adding additional information is like adding a foot to Mount Everest.
- Ari Fleischer
I was proud to share the stories of my friends at Georgetown Law who have suffered dire medical consequences because our student insurance does not cover contraception for the purpose of preventing pregnancy.
- Sandra Fluke
When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, "To mourn," and then, "To mourn try to live," he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, "Neither." "For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?" "For as long as I can." "Are we talking about a weekend or a year?" I didn't write anything. The man said, "Next.
- Jonathan Safran Foer
... the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, 'To mourn,' and then, 'To try to live,' he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, 'Neither.' 'For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?' I wrote, 'For the rest of my life.
- Jonathan Safran Foer
The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- Malcolm Forbes
Everything I've always done has been for the sole purpose of increasing my lovemaking output. A lot of guys won't admit that, but I do. I just want to make love.
- Rick Fox
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
- Anatole France
An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.
- Viktor E Frankl
Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
- Jonathan Franzen
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
- Sigmund Freud
Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.
- Eduardo Galeano
Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
- Leo Tolstoy
You are here to enable the divine purpose of the Universe to unfold. That is how important you are!
- Eckhart Tolle
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. ... The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.
- Eckhart Tolle
All my stories were usually titled, 'White House Says,' 'President Bush Wants,' and I relied on transcripts from the briefings. I relied on press releases that were sent to the press for the purpose of accurately portraying what the White House believed or wanted.
- Jeff Gannon
If you agree to work for us, half the time you won't know the purpose of your duties... and when we do explain, we might not be telling the truth. But that's the real world, folks ..
- James Alan Gardner
It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life its facility, its use.
- William H Gass
But what we're determined to do, and what the reforms will do is to make sure this system goes back to its core purpose of taking the savings of Americans and from investors around the world and allocating those to people with an idea, not just the largest companies in the country, but to small businesses with an idea and a plan for growing.
- Timothy Geithner
The purpose of debates is to explore issues, not end them.
- David Gemmell
The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.
- Thomas Hardy
What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority. If voters care about parking lots, then talk about parking lots.
- Newt Gingrich
I think to close half of Magic Kingdom for the purpose of a White House invitation town hall meeting on a phony main street on behalf of a phony president just strikes me as weird.
- Newt Gingrich
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
- Emma Goldman
It is not the purpose of the ad or commercial to make the reader or listener say, 'My what a clever ad.' It is the purpose of advertising to make the reader say, 'I believe I'll buy one when I'm shopping tomorrow'.
- Morris Hite
If part of the purpose of making an album is to get some radio play, then you might as well think about that. But that's not really how we picked the songs.
- Mike Gordon
...there began to come to her a first dim realization of God's humility. Rejected by the proud in His own right by what humble means He chose to succor them; through the spirit of a child, a poor gypsy or an old man, by a song perhaps, or even it might be by the fall of a leaf or the scent of a flower. For His infinite and humble patience nothing was too small to advance His purpose of salvation and eternity was not too long for its accomplishment.
- Elizabeth Goudge
The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.
- Juan Goytisolo
We need to be celebrating those who serve us rather than mocking them for the purpose of getting on TV and selling some books.
- Jennifer M Granholm
the purpose of art is to provide what the world cannot.
- Tom Robbins
The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.
- Tom Robbins
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
- Franz Grillparzer
We have to remember we're in a global economy. The purpose of fiscal stimulus is not simply to sustain activity in our national economies, but to help the global economy as well, and that's why it's so critical that measures in those packages avoid anything that smacks of protectionism.
- Stephen Harper
There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.
- Sam Harris
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
- Sydney J Harris
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.
- Sydney J Harris
I believe that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
- William Henry Harrison
All the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
- William Henry Harrison
I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
- William Henry Harrison
Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a point where you could not go back, whereas the stories changedit transformed you, too.
- Ursula Hegi
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
- William Saroyan
He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.
- Chaim Potok
I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.
- Barbara Hepworth
The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them.
- Auberon Herbert
The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.
- Frank Herbert
All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more strongly the truths come from on high, and contained in the sacred writings.
- William Herschel
The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song.
Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel
The 2 million people who work in the NHS and social care are also themselves patients and users. I know they all want to treat patients and users the way they and their families would want to be treated and that is the purpose of our reforms.
- Patricia Hewitt
As we got closer to marriage, I felt completely confident that Gordon loved me. But I also knew somehow that I would never come first with him. I knew I was going to be second in his life and that the Lord was going to be first. And that was okay. It seemed to me that if you understood the gospel and the purpose of our being here, you would want a husband who put the Lord first.
- Marjorie Pay Hinckley
It is my faith and conviction that the Constitution came not alone of the brain and purpose of man, but of the inspiration of God.
- Gordon B Hinckley
Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.
- Richard Holloway
The purpose of Knowledge is to create a doorway which leads to the Truth
- Misha Hoo
The purpose of my life is being a father to my kids and being a husband to my wife.
- Terrence Howard
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