Purpose and Meaning of Life

The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.

If you can't do great things, do small things in a great way. Don't wait for great opportunities. Seize common, everyday ones and make them great.

Plan for the future, because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

Life is short, and the boulder against which one pushes with all one’s might moves from its spot only with long intermissions.

Life is a great tapestry. The individual is only an insignificant thread in an immense and miraculous pattern.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.

All I seek, the heaven above

Man is a useless passion.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

The value of life lies not in the length of days but in the use you make of them; he has lived for a long time who has little lived. Whether you have lived enough depends not on the number of your years but on your will.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

The unbearable lightness of being.

Call the world if you please ‘The vale of soul-making’.

He left the name, at which the world grew pale,

He [the poet] must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind.

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?