"The good life haunts us. Everything we do is directed, consciously or subconsciously, toward attaining it." [Yi-Fu Tuan, The Good Life 6 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)]

"It is not a trivial question, Socrates said: what we are talking about is how one should live. Or so Plato reports him, in one of the first books written about this subject. Plato thought that philosophy could answer the question. Like Socrates, he hoped that one could direct one's life, if necessary redirect it, through an understanding that was distinctively philosophical--that is to say, general and abstract, rationally reflective, and concerned with what can be known through different kinds of inquiry.

The aims of moral philosophy, and any hopes it may have of being worth serious attention, are bound up with the fate of Socrates' question, even if it is not true that philosophy, itself, can reasonably hope to answer it." [Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1985)]

"What shall we do and how shall we live? According to Plato and Tolstoy and other reliable observers, this is our most important question! We should not trust any philosophy that makes this question appear foolish." [Peter Singer, The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory, 94 Yale L. J. 1, 3 (1984)]

"In the opening passages of the Politics, as Aristotle begins to explain the nature and ends of a polity, he takes care to make the elementary point that 'men do all their acts with a view to achieving something which is, in their view, a good.' Whether we seek to change any state of affairs or to resist change, whether we decide to spend our days writing books or repairing cars, all of our actions imply at least a rough understanding of the things that are, in general, good or bad, better or worse. When we contemplate those things that stand, universally, as good or bad, justified or unjustified, we are in the domain of morals (or ethics); and as Aristotle understood, the matter of ethics is, irreducibly, a practical concern: ethics involves an understanding of the standards that ultimately guide our practice or the activities of our daily lives." [Hadley Arkes, First Things: An Inquiry Into the First Principles of Morals and Justice 3 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986)]

"[Philosophy is] a way of contemplating, examining, or thinking about what is taken to be significant, valuable, beautiful, worthy of commitment." [Maxine Green, Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age 7 (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Co., 1973)]

"What can liberal education mean if not to reflect intelligently on the nature of the good life?" [Yi-Fu Tuan, The Good Life 6 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)]

"Of all the upheavals of history and culture, it is difficult to imagine any of greater significance than the decline and fall not of some one vision of the good but of the good itself. The rise of the notion that there is no such phenomenon as the good in the objective nature of things must be the most ironic possible anticlimax to centuries of bitter conflict between those who felt themselves empowered to define the good." [Manfred Stanley, The Technological Conscience: Survival and Dignity in an Age of Expertise 21 (New York: Free Press, 1978)]