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.

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.

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.

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.