Time's arrow of 'just history' marks each moment of time with a distinctive brand. But we cannot, in our quest to understand history, be satisfied only with a mark to recognize each moment and a guide to order events in temporal sequence. Uniqueness is the essence of history, but we also crave some underlying generality, some principles of order transcending the distinction of moments-lest we be driven mad by Borges's vision of a new picture every two thousand pages in a book without end. We also need, in short, the immanence of time's cycle.

Evolution is the conviction that organisms developed their current forms by an extended history of continual transformation, and that ties of genealogy bind al…

I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.

I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Ha…

'The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man [s…

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country…

In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successiv…