It is an illuminating sign of beauty's generation by desire, that when the object of desire is securely won, the sense of its beauty languishes; few men are philosopher enough to desire what they have, and fewer still can find beauty in what no longer stirs desire.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.