I’m in the process of reading “Style; Lessons in Clarity and Grace”. It’s a book about how to create good prose, focusing on a set of tips that tend to produce rich and impactful writing, and by providing examples that illustrate each point. Some of those examples are obviously crafted for the purpose of demonstrating the author’s ideas, but others were taken from already existing and excellent pieces of literature. One such quote was not only a masterpiece of English, but also contained a powerful, thought-provoking idea. The passage was originally from