Purposes

Famous quotes containing the word purposes:

    It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    So shall you hear
    Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
    Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
    Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
    And in this upshot, purposes mistook
    Fallen on th’inventors’ heads.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.
    Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)