Quotes About Motivation

Man must believe in realities outside his own smallness, outside the 'triviality of everydayness', if he is to do anything worthwhile.

I had learned a basic lesson: that the secret of avoiding boredom is to have a strong sense of purpose.

He learned from Novalis that every man is potentially hero and genius; that only inertia keeps men mediocre.

The first one hundred pages were fueled by early Misfits ("Where Eagles Dare [fast version]," "Horror Business," "Hybrid Moments") and Blanck Mass ("Dead Format"). David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.

Do not doubt you inspire with every breath, that every breath is a marvel of engineering.

Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money.

Because to walk around with that in your mind and do nothing was to die.

or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry.

Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.

In the end you should probably know your characters as well as you know yourself. Not only what they had for breakfast this morning, but what they wanted to have for breakfast.

There are a few things that touch your soul, that you know you were put on this earth to see to fruition.

You give up on what you need to be doing because you forget that you're worth it. This is why most people aren't leading exemplary lives...You have to believe in yourself so much that you're willing to do what's uncomfortable, time-consuming, inconvenient, and on occasion seemingly impossible. When you don't believe in yourself this much, pretend.

Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes... Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.

They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

The pleasure principle is an artificial creation of psychology. Pleasure is not the goal of our aspirations, but the consequence of attaining them.

There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.

What a man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

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. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy.

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.

having a Why to live for enabled them to bear the How.

Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.

He who has a strong enough why will find the how.