I have sown Dragon's teeth and reaped only fleas. - Heinrich Heine

Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.

All I really want is enough to live on, a little house in the country... and a tree in the garden with seven of my enemies hanging in it.

[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again…