How odious a virtue the much praised simplicity. The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex… - Oliver Wendell Holmes

The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex — not that which never has divined it.

A page of history is worth a volume of logic.

[I]t might seem that the law of life is . . . that man should produce food and raiment in order that he might produce yet other food and other raiment to the end of time. Yet who does not rebel at that conclusion?

Law, being a practical thing, must found itself on
actual forces. It is quite enough, therefore, for the law, that man, by an instinct which he shares with the domestic dog, and of which the seal gives a most striking example, will not allow himself to be
dispossessed, either by force or fraud, of what he holds, without trying to get it back again.
Philosophy may find a hundred reasons to justify the instinct, but it would be totally immaterial if it
should condemn it and bid us surrender without a murmur.