This, unlike most books of quotations, is not culled from other anthologies, but is the product of thousands of books read and remembered over a lifetime. Kehl is concerned with fresh insight and unhackneyed response. The quotations are those he has found most useful in cultivating independent thinking. He shares the educational goal defined by Sidney Jourard: "The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we become undeaf, unblind and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meanings in the new book of our existence."