Confucius, quoted in The Wisdom of Confucius, ed. Lin Yutang:

"Among the means for the regeneration of mankind, those made with noise and show are of the least importance."

"There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

"My patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I could not help learning essential things from them. Encounters with people of so many different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities. The finest and most significant conversations of my life were anonymous."

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology:

"I have studied many times the marble which was chiseled for me -- a boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. In truth it pictures not my destination but my life. For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment; sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid; ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances. Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life. And now I know that we must lift the sail and catch the winds of destiny wherever they drive the boat. To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, but life without meaning is the torture. Of restlessness and vague desire -- it is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science:

"Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?"

Martin Page, How I Became Stupid:

"When you realize that you are one of the rare few who observe moral principles in their relationships with others, there is a temptation to sink into amorality, not out of conviction or pleasure but simply to avoid further pain, because there is no greater suffering than being an angel in hell, whereas a devil feels at home wherever he goes."

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness:

"Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as the Other sees me...The Other...is presented in a certain sense as the radical negation of my experience, since he is the one for whom I am not subject but object. Therefore as the subject of knowledge I strive to determine as object the subject who denies my character as subject and who himself determines me as object."

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country:

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. "Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon?