“That’s true enough, but we must go and work in the garden.”

Candide (when reminded by Pangloss that all is for the best) in Voltaire Candide

“we have lost a vision of man. We are not sure how different he actually is from animal or vegetable or rock or mineral. It is partly, I think, because we have ceased trying to relate ourselves to God: we no longer even cry that God is dead; instead, we have named him an hypothesis, a dream, and turned him over to the laboratory to ‘prove.’ And because we have stopped searching for God we have stopped searching for ultimate meaning, saying there is no purpose in human existence. Hence all is absurdity, all is nothing. The more honest among those who want God ‘proved’ tend to seek uneasy solace in neo-nihilism; or, putting heart above logic, in humanism - while the less honest settle for their own brand of idol worship, sacrificing all to success or skin color or capitalism or communism or their work or their pleasure, whispering, Let’s don’t think about it.”

Lillian Smith Killers of the Dream

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”

Elliot Carver (the villain) in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies

“Darwin himself, asked about the implications of his theory for religion and morality, replied that while the idea of God was ‘beyond the scope of man’s intellect,’ man’s moral obligations were what they had always been: to ‘do his duty.’ Leslie Stephen, after abandoning the effort to derive an ethic from Darwinism, finally confessed: ‘I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.’ George Eliot uttered the classic statement of this secular ethic when she said that God was ‘inconceivable,’ immortality ‘unbelievable,’ but duty nonetheless ‘peremptory and absolute.’”

Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Mahatma Gandhi
 

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the FORTUNE OF OTHERS, and render THEIR HAPPINESS necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."

Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, quoted by Preston Manning in Fraser Forum July 2001 [a reprint of his address to the Fraser Institute Annual General Meeting].

"'Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.’ – Bertrand Russell, atheist"

2nd header quotation in Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life Chapter 1