The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

Blaise Pascal

In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene. Pollution is growing at a rapid rate. Pollution destroys beauty and menaces health. It cuts down on efficiency, reduces property values and raises taxes. Almost all these wastes and pollutions are the result of activities carried on for the benefit of man. A prime national goal must be an environment that is pleasing to the senses and healthy to live in. Our Government is already doing much in this field. We have made significant progress. But more must be done.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Without self-respect there can be no genuine success. Success won at the cost of self-respect is not success ? for what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own self-respect.

B. C. Forbes

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

Thomas Paine

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny him with their life style. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.band: dc Talk; album: Jesus Freak; used in the prelude to the song What If I Stumble?

Brennan Manning

It's like those eerie stories nurses tell,Of how some actor on a stage played Death,With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,And called himself the monarch of the world;Then, going in the tire-room afterward,Because the play was done, to shift himself,Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly,The moment he had shut the closet door,By Death himself. Thus God might touch a PopeAt unawares, ask what his baubles mean,And whose part he presumed to play just now.Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!

Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram

A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.

St. Basil

There are powers inside of you which, if you could discover and use, would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.

Orison Swett Marden

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

George Eliot

How easy for those who do not bulge to not overindulge!

Ogden Nash

The innocent and the beautiful Have no enemy but time

William Butler Yeats

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Thomas Jefferson, From a letter