Echoes

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, honorable, compassionate.

The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live. And often this living nobly means that you cannot live long.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act, to make use of our organs, senses, faculties — of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length.

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

I don't know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there's no doubt, either, that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics. That has given me more satisfaction than a footprint on a mountain.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.

But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.

Yes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

Faith is the best wealth for a man in this world. Righteousness when well practised brings happiness. Truth is the sweetest of flavours. They say the life of one living by wisdom is the best.

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Do not, my soul, seek immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Be thou never without something to do; be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or doing something that is useful to the community.

The purpose of life...is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.