Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

My temperament is not inclined toward more self-promotion than is absolutely necessary for my professional well-being.

Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.

Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.