A Literary Prescription for

Living with Intention

For choosing your life on purpose, rather than drifting through it.

It is startlingly easy to live by accident. The days fill up, the years slide by, and one morning you look up and wonder how you ended up here, carried along by habit and hurry and other people’s plans. Living with intention is the quiet, ongoing work of choosing instead: deciding what matters, and then, imperfectly, spending your days on it. These books and poems are for that work, for anyone who wants to hold the reins of their own one life a little more firmly.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Some of these are clear, practical guides to focus, habit and choosing what matters, and some are deeper meditations on the deliberate life. Non-fiction and one fine novel together, they share a single conviction: that a life is built out of days, and days out of choices, and that the choosing can be taken back into your own hands.

The One Thing

Gary Keller & Jay Papasan · 2013

Keller’s book is a sustained argument against scattered, busy, unfocused living, built around one clarifying question: what is the one thing you can do such that everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? It is practical and a little relentless, in the best way. For anyone drowning in competing priorities, it is a clear path back to what actually matters.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Stephen R. Covey · 1989

Covey’s classic is really about living from principle rather than impulse: being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, putting first things first. Beneath the business-book packaging is a genuinely thoughtful philosophy of the deliberate life. A foundational read for anyone who wants to stop reacting to their days and start directing them.

The Power of Habit

Charles Duhigg · 2012

Duhigg reveals how much of life runs on autopilot, and, more usefully, how those automatic loops can be understood and changed. Since a life is largely the sum of its habits, learning to reshape them is one of the most practical tools there is for living on purpose. Fascinating, well told and quietly empowering.

Walden

Henry David Thoreau · 1854

Thoreau went to the woods, he said, because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. Walden is the original argument for intention over drift, for simplicity over clutter, for asking what a life is actually for. Prickly, beautiful and endlessly quotable, it is the deep root of every modern book on living with purpose.

The Creative Act

Rick Rubin · 2023

Ostensibly about creativity, Rubin’s book is really a gentle philosophy of paying attention and living awake to your own life. He treats intention as a way of being present to what matters and clearing away what does not. Calm, spacious and quietly profound, it is a lovely companion for anyone wanting to live and work more deliberately.

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles · 2016

Confined for decades to a single hotel, Towles’s count builds a life of extraordinary grace, purpose and attention within the narrowest of circumstances. It is a beautiful novel about choosing, every single day, how to meet your life, whatever its limits. For anyone who feels hemmed in, the Count is proof that intention can flourish anywhere.

Poems about living with intention

For a life chosen on purpose

from “If—”

Rudyard Kipling, 1910

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
…And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

Kipling’s famous poem is really a portrait of a life lived on purpose: steady, self-possessed, refusing to waste the unforgiving minute. Whatever you make of its old-fashioned frame, the core holds, that a good life is built moment by chosen moment. A bracing thing to keep near the desk on the days you feel yourself drifting.

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from “The Road Not Taken”

Robert Frost, 1916

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Frost’s most quoted lines are, at heart, about the weight of a choice, about the fact that a life is shaped by which roads we deliberately take. It is subtler and more ambiguous than it is often made to sound, which is exactly why it lasts. A reminder that the choosing itself, owned and not avoided, is what makes the difference.

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from “Barter”

Sara Teasdale, 1917

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
…Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost.

Teasdale offers the most beautiful version of living with intention: decide what is truly worth having, the loveliness, the splendid things, and then spend your one life on it wholeheartedly, without hedging. Her clear, modern voice turns a whole philosophy into a few unforgettable lines. A poem about choosing what matters, and then really choosing it.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about living with intention to keep

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Socrates

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It is not enough to be busy. The question is: what are we busy about?

Henry David Thoreau

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You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Marcus Aurelius

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A life is only ever made of days. Spend them on what you love, and you will have loved your life.

Georgia Clare

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Intention without action is an insult to those who expect the best from you.

Andy Andrews

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From Georgia

Beginning on purpose

A short morning practice for setting a clear intention before the day carries you off, and an essay on picturing the life you want and steering towards it.

Morning Mindfulness: Intention Setting

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A brief morning practice for choosing one clear, kind intention, so the day is shaped by you rather than simply happening to you.

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New Beginnings Visualisation

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A guided visualisation for picturing the life you intend to build, and taking your first clear, calm steps toward it.

Listen Now For Free

Use Your Imagination to Create a Better Future

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On the practical power of picturing the life you actually want, and taking the small, deliberate steps that steer you towards it.

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The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Living with Intention

Where should I start?

Start with The One Thing by Gary Keller, which cuts through the noise with a single, freeing question: what is the one thing that would make everything else easier or unnecessary? And if you want the deep, timeless version, Thoreau’s Walden is the original manifesto for living deliberately. The poems below are short and worth keeping close as reminders.

What can I read to live more deliberately?

Books that help you choose rather than drift. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Power of Habit are both, underneath the practical advice, about designing a life on purpose rather than by default. Or begin with the poems and the lines to keep further down the page. Living with intention is really just the daily practice of choosing, and these are good teachers of it.

Which quotes about living with intention are worth keeping?

Quotes worth keeping include “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” (Annie Dillard), “The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates) and “It is not enough to be busy; the question is: what are we busy about?” (Henry David Thoreau). You will find these and more in the quotes section above.

Can reading really help me live with more intention?

It genuinely can. Most of us drift more than we mean to, carried along by habit, other people’s expectations and the sheer momentum of a busy life. Reading people who have thought hard about how to live on purpose, from Thoreau by his pond to modern writers on focus and habit, is like being handed the reins again. The books do not live your life for you, but they help you take it back.

Living with Intention

Prescribed reading

For a life chosen on purpose

Quotes about living with intention to keep

Beginning on purpose

Reading for Living with Intention

Where should I start?

What can I read to live more deliberately?

Which quotes about living with intention are worth keeping?

Can reading really help me live with more intention?

More prescriptions await.