“Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss.”

Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind (discussing Nietzsche’s views)

“‘The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

G.K. Chesterton, “Sir Walter Scott,” in Twelve Types, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (1-2/05)

“It seems to be the great business of life to create wants as fast as they are satisfied."

Samuel Johnson Adventurer 119 quoted in a footnote to my edition of Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas

“When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, 'licking the earth.’”

Malcolm Muggeridge in "A Twentieth-Century Testimony", quoted by Stephen R. Covey The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic

“All serious political and moral philosophy, and thus any serious social inquiry, must begin with an understanding of human nature. Though society and its institutions shape man, man’s nature sets limits on the kinds of societies we can have. Cicero said that the nature of law must be founded on the nature of man (a natura hominis discenda est natura juris).”

James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature

“The eighth mistake consists in the astounding, yet in our day widely prevalent, denial of human nature.”

Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes

“Happiness is a hard master – particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.”

Mustapha Mond in Aldous Huxley Brave New World

“‘What fun it would be,’ he [Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe] thought, ‘if one didn’t have to think about happiness.’”

Aldous Huxley Brave New World