Related:

• The agreement of so many kinds of animals in a certain common structure
  which seems to be fundamental not only in their skeletons, but also in the arrangement of the other parts - so that a wonderfully simple typical form, by the shortening and lengthening of some parts, and by the suppression and development of others, might be able to produce an immense variety of species - allows a ray of hope, however faint, to enter our minds, that here perhaps some result may be obtained, by the application of the principle of the mechanism of nature (without which there can be no natural science in general)....
• Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, and an exchange of good office
  it is a species of commerce out of which self-love always expects to gain something....
• Extreme avarice is always mistaken; there is no passion which is oftener further away from its mark, nor upon which the present has so much power to the prejudice of the future.
  -- La Rochefoucauld...
• K is a consonant that we get from the Greeks, but it can be traced away back beyond them to the Cerathians, a small commercial nation inhabiting the peninsula of Smero.
  In their tongue it was called _Klatch_, which means "destroyed....
• bogon /boh'gon/ n. [very common; by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons'
  ee the Bibliography in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces `Vogons' as `Bogons' at one point] 1....
• All advances by degrees in Nature, and nothing by leaps, and this law as applied to each, is part of my doctrine of Continuity.
  Although there may exist in some other world species intermediate between Man and the Apes, Nature has thought it best to remove them from us, in order to establish our superiority beyond question....
• We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them.
  -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld...
• The veracity which increases with old age is not far from folly.
  -- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) -- Maxim 416...
• How it is that our memory is able to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
  -- Duc de La Rochefoucauld...