Quotes about purpose

Very often when we have found ourselves forever separated from what we had intended to achieve, we have already, on our way, found something else worth desiring.

He that dies in an earnest pursuit, is like one that is wounded in hot blood; who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind fixed, and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth avert the dolors of death.

'Somehow running away seldom seems to work out well unless you have a pretty good idea what you're running to."

DONALD BARTHELME: ...I was trying to make fiction that was like certain kinds of modern painting. You know, tending toward the abstract. But it’s really very dicey in fiction, because if you get too abstract it just looks like fog, for example.

JO BRANS: Words, after all, have referents. They mean something—colors don’t.

BARTHELME: Not in the same way. So, the project is next to impossible, which is what makes it interesting. There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem. It gives purpose to life. And to work. I’m still worrying with it.

Space is infinite to men without destinations.

The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.

If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell’s own price in the end, but if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, storm the Dark Tower and win it? What could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one’s object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one’s object as a monster…To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?

Had he come this far just to die, then? He would not. And if he were to die in spite of his determination, he would die on his way to the Tower.

Why I ran at all or with what purpose in mind is beyond my answering, but when I had no specific destination I always ran as fast as I could in the hope of finding one--and I always found one.

What purpose and will didn’t tell you, unfortunately, was how to do something that must be done.

For the vision to be taken seriously, the destination- or the goal- has to be attainable. It's your vision, so you need to determine the timing. With your destination in focus, you need to describe who you are, what you do, and how you are going to get there.

If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.