Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
- George Santayana
To …

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
- Henry David Thoreau
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
- Henry David Thoreau
What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
- Henry David Thoreau
Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
- Henry David Thoreau
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that …

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
- Helen Keller
People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
- Helen Keller
What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.
- Helen Keller
I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.
- Helen Keller
Knowledge is love and light and vision.
- Helen Keller
All …

Men of ill judgment ignore the good that lies within their hands, till they have lost it.
- Sophocles
A brave man dead, not even though you hate him.
- Sophocles
I see the state of all of us who live, nothing more than phantoms or a weightless shadow.
- Sophocles
Do not grieve yourself too much for those you hate, nor yet forget them utterly.
- Sophocles
Now I see that going out into the testing ground of men it is the tongue and not the deed that wins the day.
- Sophocles
There is no sense in crying …