“He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.”

— Douglas Adams, book Mostly Harmless

Source: Mostly Harmless

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it." by Douglas Adams?

Douglas Adams photo

Douglas Adams317

English writer and humorist 1952–2001

Related quotes

“He came to a halt in a hollow and got his breath back. He felt himself freed of a great burden by getting out of sight of other people. The previous days and nights had been eventful, and he had lost himself. But now he was sure he would find himself again, like a dead man who finds himself, little by little, in the next world. In spite of everything, and although he was in reality a newborn babe in this new world, it was delightful to be born anew and to own a share of the sun like others instead of having to wait half the year perhaps for one little ray of sunshine.... No, there's probably no way of making something cease to exist once it has come into existence. He was no longer afraid of the immortality of the soul, that doctrine which for a time had seemed to him the height of human cruelty. Today it was the many and various abodes of the Creator which enchanted the mind.... and death did not exist.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“He had never been lonely in his life before he met her, having at the worst found good company in himself; but now he longed for a companion, and out of all the many millions of the earth's inhabitants there was only one that he wanted.”

John Buchan book The House of the Four Winds

Prologue
The House of the Four Winds (1935)

“Had she thought there was no meaning in life, no purpose, when God had gone? Yes, she had thought that.
“Well, there is now,” she said aloud, and again, louder: “There is now!””

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Mary in Ch. 34 : There is Now
His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)

“All in all he had not done badly out of the war, but the smells of it, the sights of it, and the cries of pain that attended it like the vultures, had sickened and soured him. Yes, he could fight well enough. And kill efficiently. He feared death, like other men, but could put that from his mind in battle, and he was no fool with a sword or knife. But several smoking ruins ago there had come a curious shift inside himself. He had lost his sense of purpose in the war; he supposed because it was not truly his own purpose but that of the King.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 1, “Avillis” (p. 4)

“All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge…. And now revenge was all that life had left for him.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 33 (p. 428).

“If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing—flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 2 (pp. 404-405)

“Could it be possible, Hezekiah asked himself, that there was no room for both the faith and truth, that they were mutually exclusive qualities that could not coexist? He shuddered as he thought of it, for if this should be the case, they had spent their centuries of devotion to but little purpose, pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp. Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead? If that were the situation, then which one did they want? Had it been, he wondered, that men had tried what they even now were trying and had realized that there was no such thing as truth, but only faith, and being unable to accept the faith without its evidence, had dropped the faith as well?”

Clifford D. Simak book A Choice of Gods

Ch 7
A Choice of Gods (1972)

“If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a hundred — one per cent of an education. He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole of it.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.”

Iris Murdoch book The Philosopher's Pupil

The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 165.

Related topics