Matthew McConaughey on purpose

Your purpose in life is to create something that outlasts you.

~ Matthew McConaughey

 

MIchael Rectenwald reflects on youth vs. experience and his life's mission

Seeing photos of myself -- on the one hand, I wish that I was younger.  I don't see myself as the camera sees me.  In my mind's eye, I'm still a young man -- forever young and never aged.  I see a young man in my mirror, not a 60-something year-old.  It's why, for example, I expect to beat my very talented thirty-year-old son in tennis, why I overextend myself, why I never expect to be tired.  It's why I catch sly, half glimpses of myself that never betray me or my age, why I think I am still as attractive as I ever was. 

On the other, I am grateful that I am no longer young.  With age comes a seasoning that makes one more or less inured to life's difficulties and inoculated to its many lies.  There is a resting knowledge that cannot be replicated in youth, youth that pines for a future that never comes as expected.  If I were to offer any advice to the young, it would be to seize the day and enjoy the process of making a way for tomorrow, with faith, hope, and charity. 

And then there is the historical reality that I would not want to be young in a world such as ours, when the world is more insane than ever, and bound to get worse.  This is why I pray for my children and my grandson, and why I keep trying, in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds, to make the world more habitable for them, to endow them with liberty and hope, and to enshrine the present by leaving a legacy to them that may be meaningful and serve as a guide for them.  I hope one day that they will read my works and realize that was part of my life's mission.

~ Michael Rectenwald

(This quote was provided by Tom Woods.  Tom writes: "It's very rare to find someone late in his career, and in his 50s, who has a complete philosophical transformation.  But that's what happened with the great Michael Rectenwald, an ex-Marxist formerly of New York University...  Well, the other day he wrote something rather melancholy and introspective -- yet determined and fearless, too, that I thought you might want to see.")

William James on purpose

The great use of life is to spend it doing something that will outlast it.

~ William James, father of American psychology

Viktor Frankl on man's purpose

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.

~ Viktor Frankl

Friedrich Nietzche on purpose

He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

~ Friedrich Nietzche

Harold S. Kushner on theories of life's quests

Terrible as it was, [Victor Frankl's] experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his of her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. 

~ Harold S. Kushner, Man's Search For Meaning, Foreword, p. x