Mozart began his works in childhood and a childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned on him that the Requiem he was writing for s a stranger was his own.

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilised.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.

If you have character, endeavor, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labor, you will do what is your destiny – and, perhaps, even do it well.

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.