il [Zénon] savait fort bien qu'il n'existe aucun accommodement durable entre ceux qui cherchent, pèsent, dissèquent, et s'honorent d'être capables de… - Marguerite Yourcenar

I will not fall. I have reached the center. I listen to the striking of who knows what divine clock through the thin carnal wall of a life full of blood, of shudderings, and of breathings. I am near the mysterious kernel of things as one is sometimes near a heart at night.

The future of the world no longer disturbs me; I do not try still to calculate, with anguish, how long or how short a time the Roman peace will endure; I leave that to the Gods. Not that I have acquired more confidence in their justice, which is not our justice, or more faith in human wisdom; the contrary is true. Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and pediments will rise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.

Се сомневам дека и цела филозофија на светот би успеала да го укине ропството; во најдобар случај, ќе му го смени името. Во состојба сум да замислам полоши форми на ропство од нашите, полоши зашто се поподмолни; било затоа што ќе успеат да ги претворат луѓето во глупави и задоволни машини што замислуваат дека се слободни иако се под јарем, било затоа што кај нив ќе се развие, исклучувајќи ги безделничењето и уживањата, желба за постојана работа, каква што е страста за војување кај варварските раси. Јас повеќе го сакам нашето вистинско ропство од тоа ропство на духот и човечката фантазија.