“It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.”

“You can't improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

“If there is a single moment … to give meaning to Emerson's life, it would be this moment when he recognized that his proper response to the world must be astonishment, his proper expression celebration.”

Robert D. Richardson (1934) American historian

“The proper functioning of the state is dependent on the proper functioning of the individual, rather than the reverse. And the proper mode of individual Being that's redemptive is Truth. Truth is the antidote to the suffering that emerges with the fall of man in the story of Adam and Eve.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

“Blessings may appear under the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let him have patience, and he will see them in their proper figures.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

“There is no proper meaning … every expression is essentially tropic.”

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) Greek-French philosopher

“Life itself is the proper binge.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

“Art is the proper task of life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“With the proper understanding of the economic system, the workers will soon find means to end that system, and to raise on its ruins a development of society having for its goal the benefit of the whole, instead of a part, of the community.”

William Earsman (1884–1965) Australian left-wing activist

“Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in a mixed company.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters