Echoes

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

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

We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, Life.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

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

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

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

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.

Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.

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

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.

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.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

I believe people work for satisfaction.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.

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.

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

Just practice good, do good for others, without thinking of making yourself known so that you may gain reward. Really bring benefit to others, gaining nothing for yourself. This is the primary requisite for breaking free of attachments to the Self.

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

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.