Sermon quotes on Aim
Aristotle (For Contrast)
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God has reserved to Himself the right to determine the end of life, because He alone knows the goal to which it is His will to lead it. It is for Him alone to justify a life or to cast it away.
G.K. Chesterton
The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it.
The Man Who Was Thursday
Charles Dickens
My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.
David Copperfield
Jacques Ellul
No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed- to go nowhere.
Thomas Hardy
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Robert P. Harrison
Precisely because our frenzy is fundamentally aimless while remaining driven, we set ourselves goals whose main purpose is to keep the frenzy going until it consummates itself in sloth. If at present we are seeking to render the totality of the earth’s resources endlessly available, endlessly usable, endlessly disposable, it is because endless consumption is the proximate goal of a production without end.
“Toward a Philosophy of Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995)
Soren Kierkegaard (attributed)
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
C.S. Lewis
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.
The Joyful Christian
C.S. Lewis
True friends face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.
Mark the Monk
Do not think or do anything without having some aim in sight; the person who journeys aimlessly will have labored in vain.
On the Spiritual Law
Michelangelo
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
Jean-Paul Sartre (For Contrast)
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
Henry David Thoreau
In the long run, you hit only what you aim for.
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