Ansonia’s Reviews > Memoirs of Hadrian: And, Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian > Status Update

"A part of every life, even a life meriting very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source . . . When all the involved calculations prove false, and the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, it is excusable to turn to the random twitter of birds, or towards the distant mechanism of the stars" (26).