Every art and every inquiry, and similarly everyaction and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

-Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics, bk.1, ch.1,1093 (translated by Sir David Ross).

Of course, in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.

-Bellow, Saul
  Henderson The Rain King, ch.3.

Pour ce qu'alors je de¤  sirais vaquer seulement a'   la recherche de la ve¤  rite¤ ,  je pensai qu'il fallait que je†rejetasse comme absolument faux tout ce en quoi je pourrais imaginer le moindre doute, afin de voir s'il ne resterait point, apre'  s cela, quelque chose en ma cre¤  ance qui f u" t entie'  rement indubitable. Sincemy present aimwastogivemyself up tothepursuit of truth alone, I thought I must†reject as if absolutely false anything as to which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if I should not be left at the end believing something that was absolutely indubitable.

-Descartes, Rene¤
  Discours de la me¤  thode (Discourse on Method), 4th discourse (translated by G E M  Anscombe and Peter Geach).

That it is at least as difficult to staya moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignityand rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed inthe most unlikely constitutions; is a fact as firmlyestablished by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere.

-Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam
^7  Little Dorrit, bk.2, ch.13.

What men or Gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

-Keats,John
  Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems,'Ode on a Grecian Urn', stanza1.

Scientific discoveryand scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of them without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.

-Planck, Max Karl Ernst
  Where is Science Going? pt.4 (translated byJames Murphy).

Le mensonge est essentiel a'   l'humanite¤  . Il y joue peut- e"  tre un aussi grand ro"  le que la recherche du plaisir, et d'ailleurs est commande¤   par cette recherche. Lies are essential to humanity.They play perhaps asgreat a role as the pursuit of pleasure, and are indeed controlled by this pursuit.

-Proust, Marcel
' 1925  A la recherche du temps perdu,'Albertine disparue'.

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one ofthevital personal rights essentialtotheorderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

-Warren, Earl
  2 Jun. Unanimous ruling against aVirginian law forbidding intermarriage of blacks and whites.