Michael Dennis

“Is righteousness, then, something 'fickle and changeable'? No; but the periods of time over which it presides, do not all proceed alike; they are time. Men, however, whose life on earth is short, are unable to conceive with their own minds the reasoning processes of earlier generations and of other races whom they have not known for themselves, whereas in the generations they do know, they can easily see what is appropriate within one and the same body or day or house, to each lib or hour or part and person. They are scandalized by the past, and enslaved to the present”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement of fact about the Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of the opposite or a different version. Women outnumbered men because men were killed off in the wars; men outnumbered women because women died in childbirth. Common people were familiar with the Bible; common people were unfamiliar with the Bible. Nobles were tax exempt; no, they were not tax exempt. French peasants were filthy and foul-smelling and lived on bread and onions; French peasants ate pork, fowl, and game and enjoyed baths in the village bathhouses. The list could be extended indefinitely.”
― Barbara Tuchman

“All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little, we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep. In quiet eventless lives the changes internal and external are so small that there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes.”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“And Mr. Knightley always wanted us to be friends!"

"Yes, and if we had been we should have changed each other's lives."

...."Now we shall never have the chance; it it too late."

And Emma said with equal sadness: "Yes, that is true. But at least we have stopped being enemies.”
― Joan Aiken, Jane Fairfax