Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

The living have never shown me how to live.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.