Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. the idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

The difference between the past and present selves of the same individual is so great as to make them different persons for all moral purposes. That single fac…

Hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxati…

Why, when the world gets to understand about it I expect that two men or two women, or a man and a woman, will come in here, and say to me, 'We have quarrelled…

I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure.

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed s…

... men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these tw…