Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent cause of disastrous behaviour. [...] The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense [...] It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life and never again reexamined [...]. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Neither of the two men, at these times, showed the least hostility toward me, and everything went so smoothly, so amiably, that I had an absurd impression of being ‘one of the family.‘” Stranger

Lovers need to know how to lose themselves and then how to find themselves again. By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept 

One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty. Pride and Prejudice