Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
Purpose Quotes
500+ Sourced quotes
Source
Report...
Wherever desirable superfluities are imported, industry is excited, and thereby plenty is produced. Were only necessaries permitted to be purchased, men would work no more than was necessary for that purpose.
Benjamin Franklin
Source
Report...
I do not need any promise of eternity to be happy. My eternity is now. I have only one interest: to fulfill my purpose here where I am. This purpose is not given me by my parents or my surroundings. It is induced by some unknown factors. These factors make me a part of eternity.
Albert Einstein
Source
Report...
For one cannot assume that God exists to help people who are too cowardly and too lazy to help themselves and think that God exists only to make up for the weakness of mankind. He does not exist for that purpose. He has always, at all times, blessed only those who were prepared to fight their own battles....
Adolf Hitler
Source
Report...
That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance.
Oscar Wilde
Source
Report...
My own view is that taping of conversations for historical purposes was a bad decision.
Richard Nixon
Source
Report...
One should not wrongly reify 'cause' and 'effect,' as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them, now 'naturalizes' in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it 'effects' its end; one should use 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication-not for explanation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Source
Report...
Let us guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are merely necessities: there is no one who commands, no one whoobeys, no one who transgresses. Once you understand that there are no purposes, then you also understand that nothing is accidental: for it is only in a world of purposes that the word "accident" makes sense.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Source
Report...
The white tails of rabbits, according to some theologians, have a purpose, namely to make it easier for sportsmen to shoot them.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Source
Report...
It is time enough, for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere [in the propagation of religious teachings] when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.
Thomas Jefferson
Source
Report...
Withal I did infer your lineaments,
Being the right idea of your father,
Both in your form and nobleness of mind;
Laid open all your victories in Scotland,
Your discipline in war, wisdom in peace,
Your bounty, virtue, fair humility;
Indeed, left nothing fitting for your purpose
Untouch'd or slightly handled in discourse.
William Shakespeare
Source
Report...
Even a small act of compassion grants meaning and purpose to our lives.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Source
Report...
Is there conscience in the Kremlin? Do they ever ask themselves what is the purpose of life? What is it all for?... No. Their creed is barren of conscience, immune to the promptings of good and evil.
Margaret Thatcher
Source
Report...
God loves me. I'm not here just to fill a place, just to be a number. He has chosen me for a purpose. I know it.
Mother Teresa
Source
Report...
Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. From those sounds which we hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive strong impressions, or delightful images; and words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that attention on themselves which they should transmit to other things.
Samuel Johnson
Source
Report...
Children can scarcely be fashioned to meet with our likes and our purpose. Just as God did us give them, so must we hold them and love them, nurture and teach them to fullness and leave them to be what they are.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Source
Report...
The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.
Sigmund Freud
Source
Report...
The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.
C. S. Lewis
Source
Report...
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Albert Einstein
Source
Report...
Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lighting-flash, the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain.
Mark Twain
Source
Report...
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.
Henry David Thoreau
Source
Report...
War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Source
Report...
In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.
Henry David Thoreau
Source
Report...
So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.
Oscar Wilde
1
...
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes