In this unique, eclectic, surprising, and delightful book, philosopher Al Gini presents a lifetime collection of over 500 well-selected quotations on the meaning of life. He covers all the main issues most people care about, including character and moral courage, ethics, work, business, money, ambition, love and relationships, leadership, grief and death, humor and laughter, and many other "miscellaneous epiphanies." Those quoted include:

Philosophers: Aeschylus, Antiphanes, Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Balzac, Buddha, Burke, Confucius, Chardin, Dewey, Epictetus, Epicurus, Frankl, Freud,
Gandhi, Hegel, Heraclitus, Heschel, Hillel, James, Jesus of Nazareth, Jung, Kant, Locke, Luther, Machiavelli, Marcoux, Mill, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Pascal, Plato, Rousseau, Russell, Sartre, Smith, Sophocles, Tacitus, Thucydides, Tillich, Voltaire.

Writers: Aesop, Auden, Baldwin, Bellow, Bierce, Brecht, Byrne, Byron, Camus, Chesterton, Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Emerson, Fanon, Faulkner, Frost,
Gibran, Gide, Huxley, Johnson, Lawrence, Lewis, Maugham, Mencken, Milton, Moliere, Nabokov, Ovid, Percy, Pope, Proust, Saint-Exupery, Santayana, Saroyan, Shakespeare, Shaw, Shelley, Steinbeck, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Twain, Updike, Vidal, Wells, Wiesel, Wright, Wilde.

Politicians and Scientists: Bohr, Bonaparte, Churchill, Cicero, Coolidge, Da Vinci, Eban, Edison, Einstein, Franklin, Hammarskjold, Jefferson, four Kennedys, King, Kissinger, Lincoln, Maslow, Paine, Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, Salk, Schweitzer, Truman, Teller.

Women: Alcott, Bronte, Browning, Buck, Day, Eliot (Mary Evans Cross), Indira Gandhi, Keller, Kubler-Ross, Lee, Lessing, Mead, Mitchell, Nightingale, Parker, Quindlin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sand (Aurore Dupin), Sayers, Signoret, Stein, Stowe, Mother Teresa, Thatcher, Underhill.

Artists, Athletes, and Entertainers: Ali, four Allens, Ashe, Bacall, Berra, Borge, Brooks, Burns, Carson, Chaplin, Copland, Cosby, Coward, Dali, Davis, de Kooning, Goldwyn, Hendrix, Hepburn, Heston, Jordan, Keillor, Lennon, Lombardi, MacLaine, Marx, Picasso, Rogers, Sinatra, Spielberg, Tomlin, Ustinov, Wooden.

Many Others: Asimov, Bankhead, Brokaw, Brothers, Capone, Darrow, DeGeneres, Drucker, Forbes, Ford, Getty, Hoffa, Hoffman, Landers, Liddy, Severeid, Sun Tzu, Toffler, Trump, Tucker, Mae West, Yoda the Jedi.

Email: agini@luc.edu

 

Al Gini is a Professor of Business Ethics and Chair of the Department of Management in the School of Business Administration at Loyola University Chicago. He is also the cofounder and long time Associate Editor of Business Ethics Quarterly, the journal of the Society for Business Ethics. For over twenty-three years he has been the Resident Philosopher on National Public Radio’s Chicago affiliate, WBEZ-FM, and he regularly lectures to community and professional organizations on issues of business and ethics. His books include: My Job My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual (Routledge, 2000); The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure and Vacations (Routledge, 2003); Why It’s Hard to Be Good (Routledge, 2006); and, most recently, he helped to edit and wrote the prologues for The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler (The Great Books Foundation, 2007) and Even Deadlier: A Sequel (The Great Books Foundation, 2009).