"One wastes so much time, one is so prodigal of life, at twenty! Our days of winter count for double. That is the compensation of the old."

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Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too.

— Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald