Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.