Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It's also a very clear path to happiness.

I'm just interested in carving out a meaningful life.

If you aren't serving, you're just existing, because life is meant for ministry.

It is not enough to merely exist. It's not enough to say, 'I'm earning enough to live and support my family. I do my work well. I'm a good parent.' That's all very well. But you must do something more.

I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me - jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher - and becoming stronger as a result.

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

You would not exist if you did not have something to bring to the table of life.

Every character is asking: 'What's my place? Why am I here? I don't want the answer to be 'Just because.' You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason to be here and how to contribute.

It is not what we get. But who we become, what we contribute... that gives meaning to our lives.

The ancient Greek view of happiness was really defined by leading a productive life: It's not about how much you have, it's about what you do with it.

I want to do really good things with my life.

Each of us has been put on earth with the ability to do something well. We cheat ourselves and the world if we don't use that ability as best we can.

My problem is how to find the best way of being useful.

But once I acclimated and really used fame for what it was offering me as a tool to serve my life purpose of inspiring and contributing, then it started to get fun again.

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.

It seems to me that it's every man's obligation to make what contribution he can. You live each day as best you can. That, to me, is what makes life interesting.

All you wanna do in life is do what you do well. That's when you're happiest.

All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.

The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.

If I have any basic motivation, it's to inspire people to make their life a masterpiece.

Life isn't all about entertainment.

Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is: through work.

I remember promising myself that should I live I would prove myself deserving of life.

It pays no matter what comes after it, to try and do things, to accomplish things in this life and not merely to have a soft and pleasant time.

Without aspirations for a better existence, you're stuck in the mud and going nowhere.