Folly is as great as the sea, it will compass anything. - Bolesław Prus

'There are two men in me,' he thought, 'one quite sensible, the other a lunatic. But I am not concerned with that any longer... What shall I do, though, if the sensible man wins?'

Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [... He] has too many dogmas to [...] easily [...] believe in a new truth [...]; too many sympathies and antipathies [...] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; [...] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion [...].

A life whose beginning we do not remember, and whose end we do not know.