Purpose Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

Joshua Reynolds

We stand again at an inflection point. We have the opportunity to defeat despair and to build a nation of prosperity and purpose. We can do it. I know we can. I've long talked about the battle for the soul of America. We must restore the soul of America.

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

James Fenimore Cooper

For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.

John Boyle O'Reilly

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

When you choose your friends with caution, plan your future with purpose, and frame your life with faith, you will merit the companionship of the Holy Spirit.

Thomas S. Monson

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners, where troubles fester; and the whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

Sydney J. Harris

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things! And powerful things at that, when mixed with definiteness of purpose, and burning desire, can be translated into riches. Use auto-suggestion, have faith, imagination and overcome fear and time is your opposite player as in checkerboard.

Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die?... Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

Commitment means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve center of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies.

The health of the people is of supreme importance. All measures looking to their protection against the spread of contagious diseases and to the increase of our sanitary knowledge for such purposes deserve attention of Congress.

Chester A. Arthur

Bring me men to match my mountains,
Bring me men to match my plains,
Men with empires in their purpose,
And new eras in their brains.

Sam Walter Foss

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.

These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.

For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.

For a revolution is not just a question of pulling a trigger; its purpose is to create a fair just society

In business, I've discovered that my purpose is to do my best to my utmost ability every day. That's my standard. I learned early in my life that I had high standards.

Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Bertrand Russell

It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.

Henry David Thoreau

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson