There are very few human beings who receive the truth complete and staggering by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment on a small scale by successive developments cellularly like a laborious mosaic.

Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then only a few feet away in the cookbook section just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

As we moved along in a little procession I was delighted with the illumination of the streets. So many lamps and they burned until morning my father said and so people did not need to carry lanterns.

G is Grace the Flaming Star is the Torch of Reason. Those who possess this knowledge are indeed Illuminati.

When one takes action for others one's own suffering is transformed into the energy that can keep one moving forward a light of hope illuminating a new tomorrow for oneself and others is kindled.

History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

And of all illumination which human reason can give none is comparable to the discovery of what we are our nature our obligations what happiness we are capable of and what are the means of attaining it.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap it consoles it distracts it excites it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap it consoles it distracts it excites it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

It was the full conviction of this and of what could be done if every man were placed in the office for which he was fitted by nature and a proper education which first suggested to me the plan of Illumination.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.