If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?

Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.

Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is naked — or that America is culturally bankrupt.

I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: '- to the order of others'. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who are making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one's head.

The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.