Life's Purpose

Your work is to discover your work, and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.

- Buddha

You are what your deep driving desire is,

As your desire is, so is your will.

As your will is, so is your deed.

As your deed is, so is your destiny.

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5

What we steadily, consciously, habitually think we are, that we tend to become.

- Galileo

Life is no brief candle to me.  It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. 

-  George Bernard Shaw

The purpose of life is simply to count – to matter – to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

When God has given you a role to play and you can play it with divine anointing and real inspiration and by the power of His Spirit, you become that creation of God.

Whoever you are or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of the universe.  It’s your mission on Earth.

-  Paulo Coelho

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

-  Booker Washington

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well.  A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead and the unborn could do it no better.

-  Martin Luther King Jr.

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be “happy.”  I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate.  It is, above all, to matter:  To count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.

-  Leo Tolstoy

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin unto its nest again

I shall not live in vain.

- Emily Dickinson