Accumulating Quotes & Sayings

To see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, 'No, this has to stop.' — Henry Giroux

Ours is the only religion that does not depend on a person or persons; it is based upon principles. At the same time there is room for millions of persons. There is ample ground for introducing persons, but each one of them must be an illustration of the principles. We must not forget that. These principles of our religion are all safe, and it should be the life-work of everyone of us to keep then safe, and to keep them free from the accumulating dirt and dust of ages. — Swami Vivekananda

... what have you accumulated from the past - what are you in the process of accumulating that will be passed on, if not deliberately, then accidentally? Is this accumulation the best of what has been and the best of what is currently being written, sung, and created? Is it wise? And if not, what will be the next generation's inheritance, your children's legacy? — Rosalie De Rosset

We really are immortal in the sense that Christ's Atonement conquers death, both physical and spiritual. And provided we have so lived Today that we have claim on the Atonement's cleansing grace, we will live forever with God. This life is not so much a time for getting and accumulating as it is a time for giving and becoming. Mortality is the battlefield upon which justice and mercy meet. But they need not meet as adversaries, for they are reconciled in the Atonement of Jesus Christ for all who wisely use Today. — Lance B. Wickman

Mr. Denzi can teach us all something about accumulating wealth. Begin earning and investing early in your adult life. That will enable you to outpace the wealth accumulation levels of even the so-called gifted kids from your high school class. Remember, wealth is blind. — Thomas J. Stanley

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall. — Randy Alcorn

The best education you will ever get is traveling. Nothing teaches you more than exploring the world and accumulating experiences. — Mark Patterson

Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Nora had worked as a telegraphist at the Taunton Post Office and learned Morse code from her mother-in-law, accumulating valuable experience on the two common telegraphic instruments: the single needle and the — Neil McAleer

He was looking forward to his visit not only for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit, but with the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will, even though a little weakly, in the sun and air which men drank and moved in and talked and dealt with one another - a pleasure no small part of which lay in the fact that he had not started yet and was absolutely nothing under heaven to make him start until he wanted to. He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body's slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course. — William Faulkner

You're having one of those days of accumulating misery when you argue violently with someone in a position of power: a bank teller, a dry cleaner, a three-year-old. — Liane Moriarty

I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society. — Marshall McLuhan

Successful living does not mean accumulating material things, it means inner peace of mind; it means that gift of being able to adjust oneself to everyone else; it also means that all your needs for daily living will be taken care of by God. — Albert E Cliffe

In your body, the gradually accumulating burden of reactive experiences is called allostatic load, which increases inflammation, weakens your immune system, and wears on your cardiovascular system. In your brain, allostatic load causes neurons to atrophy in the prefrontal cortex, the center of top-down executive control; in the hippocampus, the center of learning and memory; and in other regions. It impairs myelination, the insulating of neural fibers to speed along their signals, which can weaken the connectivity between different regions of your brain, so they don't work together as well as they should. — Rick Hanson

Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body. — George Carlin

Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. — H.G.Wells

You achieve greatness, not by accumulating wealth, but by becoming king, loving, forgiving, and simple. — Debasish Mridha

I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief. — Noam Chomsky

If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake of accumulating wealth. Poor man, said I, you pay too much for your whistle. — Benjamin Franklin

No sooner would such a temptation present itself than I would smother it. The effect was of snuffing out a candle, two candles, a row of twenty, until the lens pulled back to reveal an entire votive stand exhaling a hundred thin lines of smoke as a terraced offering before the shrine. In this religion hidden lights had been declared superior to those that glared. Somewhere I was storing up merit, accumulating the credit I'd need to buy, one day, the salvation I longed for. Until then (and it was a reckoning that could be forestalled indefinitely, that I preferred putting off) I'd live in that happiest of all conditions: the long but seemingly prosperous courtship. It was a series of tests, ever more arduous, even perverse. For instance, I was required to deny my love in order to prove it. — Edmund White

Asked to give advice to a 13-year-old girl about how to lead her life, I say find something you love to do. The goal shouldn't be accumulating money. It might be making changes in the world, or in your country. — Karen DeCrow

How do we know that our life really happened and that we are not simply accumulating details, making it all up as we go along? — Rachel Klein

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable. — Michael Longley

You fulfill your hearts universal desire for love not by accumulating, but by giving. — Debasish Mridha

Professor Leo Buscaglia notes, "There seems to be accumulating evidence that there is actually an inborn need for this togetherness, this is human interaction, this love. It seems that without these close ties with other human beings, a new born infant, for example, can regress developmentally, lose consciousness, fall into idocy and die. — Gary Chapman

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats. — Freya Stark

[Y]ou will understand the game behind the curtain too well not to perceive the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government. — James Madison

Italy may well be the main problem. It has benefited most from the euro by having been able to get the euro interest rate instead of what otherwise would have been its own. That would be much higher because Italy has been accumulating so much debt. In the past, Italy has inflated away its debt. The virtue of the euro is that Italy can't do it alone. A tight ECB policy wouldn't permit that to happen again. — Milton Friedman

Some people get along beautifully, for half a lifetime, perhaps, while everything goes smoothly. While they are accumulating property and gaining friends and reputation, their characters seem to be strong and well-balanced; but the moment there is friction anywhere, - the moment trouble comes, a failure in business, a panic, or a great crisis in which they lose their all, - they are overwhelmed. They despair, lose heart, courage, faith, hope, and power to try again, - everything. Their very manhood or womanhood is swallowed up by a mere material loss. — Orison Swett Marden

Indulgence is a legitimate life goal, but it is only one of four life goals. No life is completely lived unless each of these goals is achieved. They are:
Dharma, the goal of fulfilling the duties assigned to us by our positions in society;
Artha, the goal of accumulating possessions in the course of fulfilling our duties;
Kama, the goal of satisfying legitimate desires with the assistance of one's accumulated possessions; and
Moksha, the goal of realizing that there is more to life than duty, possessions and desires. — Robert E. Svoboda

He could see perfectly well that "it," his life, was leading nowhere, that he wss behaving like a miser who hoards gold simply for the pleasure of looking at it, except that in his case it wssn't gold but experience, which was the one thing he took from life. And yet experience, unless applied to something, is just like that hoard of gold, for it neither produces nor bears fruit and is utterly useless. There is no point in a man accumulating experience the way someone else might collect stamps. — Jose Saramago

I watched water dripping off the ferns and the needles of the Western Red Cedar next door. I watched it running in runnels down the bark of the Cherry tree, and I looked at the small droplets of misty water that were accumulating on the broad leaves of the Bigleaf Maple.I touched one of the accumulated droplets, and instantly it was gone. — Ned Hayes

When we choose to focus on what we have we are instantly happier people. Gratitude is said to be the emotion that is most connected with happiness. Even the wealthiest person in the world can think of things they don't have. It's not about accumulating more things; it's about focusing on the joy and beauty in your life by focusing on what is great in your life. — Demi Lovato

All that a good government aims at ... is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities. — James F. Cooper

I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I have no use for eight houses, 88 cars and 500 suits. I can't eat but one steak at a time. I don't want but one woman. It's silly to have as one's sole object in life just making money, accumulating wealth. — Johnny Carson

Shugendo means: "the way of the art of accumulating experience" - he replied, revealing that his interests go beyond the variety of insects in the region - By disciplining one's body to accept everything nature has to offer; in this way you will also educate your soul for that which God has to offer. — Paulo Coelho

This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life. — Marcel Proust

Reading is accumulating knowledge. But not only that. Reading offers us every day what religion promises us for a posthumous and improbable future: the possibility of living beyond what our lifetime allows us to. — Camilo Gomes Jr.

Women should know the truth. They can take it; they are adults, not children. If a mother opts for formula rather than breastfeeding, there is good evidence that her baby will score lower on IQ tests and will have a higher risk of many illnesses including some cancers, diabetes, respiratory illnesses, diarrhea and ear infections. She should know that her own risk of breast, ovarian and uterine cancer will be higher, as well as her daughter's risk of breast cancer. The mother increases her own risk of diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and becoming overweight by "choosing" formula feeding. There is accumulating evidence that the risk of mental illness (alcoholism, ADHD, schizophrenia) is increased by not breastfeeding. A recent study suggested that even behaviour problems in adolescents are more likely if the child was formula fed. The longer the child is breastfed, the lower the risk both for the child and the mother. — Jack Newman

I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience. — Bridget Riley

Since living meant accumulating sin, I thought dying would be much better for the world. These — Haruki Murakami

What does learning mean: accumulating knowledge or transforming your life? — Paulo Coelho

We were never meant to live life accumulating stuff. We were meant to live simply enjoying the experiences of life, the people of life, and the journey of life - not the things of life. — Joshua Becker

Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end. — Charles Caleb Colton

It is a sinful abomination for one part of the world's Christians to grow richer year by year while our brothers and sisters ache and suffer for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, and even - in some cases - enough food to escape starvation. — Ronald J. Sider

The foundational Vajrakilaya is the sun shining in the sky behind the clouds. The path Vajrakilaya is the removal of the clouds from the sky through the force of wind and rain, or whatever; it is the path of method and wisdom, combined. And the resultant Vajrakilaya is the nature of your mind, the nature of your rigpa, which is the same mind as the mind of the primordial buddha, Kuntuzangpo. The path Vajrakilaya is the removal of the adventitious veil of obscuration that covers rigpa. Applying the method by practicing generation stage (kyerim) and completion stage (dzogrim), accumulating merit and purifying negative karma, removing that veil, is the path. The result is realizing that ones own self nature is buddha. So the result is the same as the foundation. In the beginning you are buddha, and in the end you are buddha. — Gyatrul Rinpoche

I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him - that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter. — John Green

He liked doing research in the library. He liked feeling of accumulating knowledge in his brain. It was something he had enjoyed ever since he was a child. — Haruki Murakami

I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives. — Mitch Kapor

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. — Oscar Wilde

It always surprises me after a family row to find that the world outdoors has remained the same. While the passions and feelings that accumulate like noxious gases inside a house seem to condense and cling to the walls and ceilings like old smoke the out-of-doors is different. The landscape seems incapable of accumulating human radiation. Perhaps the wind blows anger away. — Alan Bradley

I fear that in this thing many rich people deceive themselves. They go on accumulating the means but never using them; making bricks, but never building. — George Eliot

Too many people make the past their identity and spend the rest of their lives accumulating sympathy for their past pain. — Laura Schlessinger

The purpose of studying opening theory should not be accumulating any set amount of knowledge, but being content with whatever knowledge one has. — Paul Van Der Sterren

Out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. I stared down at what I was already grasping in my hand, like an ape; I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers.
Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them. After days of accumulating alarms, tensions, suffocations, I was beyond withstanding my own ignominy. I invoked it and I blessed it. It was my inevitable fate: my joy was all the greater since, with regard to life, I had long since entrenched myself in an attitude of suffering, and now, in the throes of delight, I progressed even farther into vileness and degradation. — Georges Bataille

...life's about accumulating wrinkles, deep as rivers and as wide as is needed to travel along their path, so that by the time you're ready to die, your life can be read. — Liam Howley

As an artist, you dream about accumulating enough successful music to someday do just one greatest-hits album, but to reach the point where you're releasing your second collection of hits is beyond belief. — Gloria Estefan

There can be no freedom of the individual, no democracy, without the capital system, the profit system, the private enterprise system. These are, in the end, inseparable. Those who would destroy freedom have only first to destroy the hope of gain, the profit of enterprise and risk-taking, the hope of accumulating capital, the hope to save something for one's old age and for one's children. For a community of men without property, and without the hope of getting it by honest effort, is a community of slaves of a despotic State. — Russell Cornell Leffingwell

Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts. — Clarence Day Jr.

God wants to supply your needs from a place you never expected, through people you never knew, in ways you never thought, but first you have to believe that it is possible. Once you understand that His ability to meet your needs is bigger than your job or your business, you will find that your source of life is bigger than the resources that you have been accumulating. — Myles Munroe

There's nothing wrong with accumulating wealth, receiving recognition for your efforts, and having some power and status--what's wrong is when you think that's who you are. — Morton Shaevitz

Take a look at your own heart, and you will soon find out what has stuck to it and where your treasure is. It is easy to determine whether hearing the Word of God, living according to it, and achieving such a life gives you as much enjoyment and calls forth as much diligence from you as does accumulating and saving money and property. — Martin Luther

Because you are not trying simply to complete a set of books or toys or Weetabix cards, you are trying to complete yourself, to get back to the whole person you were before, as a child, before the obstructions and compromises of adulthood got in the way. And yet, all you are really doing is accumulating a pile of crap, souvenirs of the futility of the quest. — Neil Perryman

This is one step along the road of moving away from a dollar peg and moving to a floating basket. This implies China will be accumulating dollars at a slower rate. — John Butler

I really believe that our stories make us who we are. I don't think people are born as empty shells. They already have the makings of a personality and they have intelligence. But from the moment they're born and maybe before that they start accumulating stories and it's those stories that have the biggest effect on them. — John Marsden

Another mode of accumulating power arises from lifting a weight and then allowing it to fall. — Charles Babbage

Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people," I say. "Maybe we're accumulating these new selves all the time." Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things. — Jandy Nelson

The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality. — Eckhart Tolle

We are reducing the number of relationships. We are slowly but surely consuming the massive reserves of energy that have been accumulating and are stored in the ecosystems. — Gunter Pauli

if everything finally comes down to inward-looking self-interest, to getting more for oneself, to accumulating wealth or power, very little is left for other motivations that can be described as true, noble, good, and lovely. — John Bolt

The Indian diaspora is not a capital-accumulating diaspora. The Indian diaspora is doctors, lawyers, professors. Or newspaper sellers. They are basically trade- or profession-oriented, and so they're not major investors in their home country. — Jairam Ramesh

Weak Forces

I enjoy an accumulating
faith in weak forces--
a weak faith, of course,
easily shaken, but also
easily regained--in what
starts to drift: all the
slow untrainings of the mind,
the sift left of resolve
sustained too long, the
strange internal shift
by which there's no knowing
if this is the raod taken
or untaken. There are soft
affinities, possibly electrical;
lint-like congeries; moonlit
hints; asymmetrical pink
glowy spots that are no
the defeat of something,
I don't think. — Kay Ryan

Matthew had been accumulating secrets ... My life might be too brief to hear them all, never mind understand them. — Deborah Harkness

Accumulating love brings luck, accumulating hatred brings calamity. — Paulo Coelho

There is but one dependable method of accumulating and legally holding riches, and that is by rendering useful service. — Napoleon Hill

Nothing makes sense anymore, because all the meaning and purpose that life had for them was associated with accumulating, succeeding, building, protecting, and sense gratification. It was associated with the outward movement and identification with form, that is to say, ego. Most people cannot conceive of any meaning when their life, their world, is being demolished. And yet, potentially, there is even deeper meaning here than in the outward movement. — Eckhart Tolle

The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright. — Stephen Jay Gould

Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. — Oscar Wilde

Moreover, even in the absence of accumulating personal experience, it was difficult to believe that soaring murder statistics reflected simply better record keeping, since it had always been hard to ignore a dead body. — Thomas Sowell

Historically, philanthropy has been something that you do when you turn 65, and you are retired, and you have spent your life accumulating your financial resources, and now you finally have time to do it. But because of the Internet revolution, that in turn revolutionized economic growth and wealth generation. — Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

The Death of Money is an engrossing account of the massive stresses accumulating in the global financial system, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. Jim Rickards is a natural teacher. Any serious student of financial crises and their root causes needs to read this book. — John H. Makin

Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words. — Terry Pratchett

I go through life accumulating possessions ... I've always done it ... and then, every once in a while, a sort of tidal wave comes along and washes them all away. — Preston Sturges

No more obsessive writing, either, accumulating notebook after notebook like little piles of rabbit turds scattered along a woodland trail. — Stephen King

I felt that fear in me could not put down roots, and even the lava, the fiery stream of melting matter settled in my mind in orderly sentences, a pavement of black stones like the streets of Naples, where I was always and no matter what at the center. Everything that struck me
my studies, books, Franco, Pietro, the children, Nino, the earthquake
would pass, and I, whatever I among those I was accumulating, I would remain firm. 179 — Elena Ferrante

Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps. — Charles Darwin

Cash from a reverse mortgage can be paid out in several ways, including a lump sum, a monthly payment, a line of credit, or a combination of those. If you do not need money right away, it is usually a bad idea to take all the money upfront, since it starts accumulating interest charges immediately. — Charles Duhigg

Definitively categorizing oneself as a switch (or as anything, really) should only be done after accumulating considerable experience in the lifestyle, getting at least a few deep and lasting D/s relationships under your belt, and after a great deal of reflection and self-exploration. Adopting the label of a "Switch" should never be the result of a "default" classification for those who are simply unsure about their D/s orientation. — Michael Makai

Who you are becoming is more important than what you are accumulating. — Robin Sharma

If you love someone, and that person dies, all that love becomes a burden, a weight accumulating, pooling inside you, with nowhere to go. — Lia Mills

It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it's all going to end. — Anne Tyler

A Greek philosopher said, 'All men think it is only the other man who is mortal'. The way we scurry about accumulating things is testimony to our unspoken doctrine that we are exceptions to the law of death. The events of September 11, 2001, were a shocking reminder to millions of Americans of something we should have already understood - our mortality. — Randy Alcorn

It is quite natural, then, that the solidly unionized professional paraphrast experiences a surge of dull hatred and fear, and in some cases real panic, when confronted with the possibility that a shift in fashion, or the influence of an adventurous publishing house, may suddenly remove from his head the cryptic rosebush he carries or the maculated shield erected between him and the specter of inexorable knowledge. As a result the canned music of rhymed versions is enthusiastically advertised, and accepted, and the sacrifice of textual precision applauded as something rather heroic, whereas only suspicion and bloodhounds await the gaunt, graceless literalist groping around in despair for the obscure word that would satisfy impassioned fidelity and accumulating in the process a wealth of information which only makes the advocates of pretty camouflage tremble or sneer. — Vladimir Nabokov

The whole time I was with 'The Temptations', I was accumulating my own solo recordings. — Ali-Ollie Woodson

Long ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives." That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance. — Jacob A. Riis

After years and years of accumulating papers, I keep feeling that I should give them to the library or something because they are beginning to overwhelm me. — Jennifer Tipton

They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Life is about accumulating a group of stories so rich and interesting that they'll serve you well beyond the time that whatever career you have has ended. That's what this day-to-day shit is really about. The accumulation of amazing stories and having the bruises to show for them. — Jason Myers

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse
appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. — Michael Oakeshott