later works, The Growth of Law (1924) and The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1927), Cardozo refined, deepened, and to some extent modified the views of law laid out in The Nature of the Judicial Process. Notable quotations The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age. (17) Nothing is stable. Nothing absolute. All is fluid and changeable. There is an endless “becoming.” We are back with Heraclitus. (28) The final cause of law is the welfare of society. (66) A constitution states or ought to state not rules for the passing hour, but principles for an expanding future. (83) The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles, by enshrining them in constitutions, and consecrating to the task of their protection a body of defenders. (92) The judge, even when he is free, is still not wholly free. He is not to innovate at pleasure. He is not a knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness. He is to draw his inspiration from consecrated principles. (141) We shall have to feel our way here as elsewhere in the law. Somewhere between worship of the past and exaltation of the present, the path of safety will be found. (160) I was much troubled in spirit, in my first years upon the bench, to find how trackless was the ocean on which I had embarked. I sought for certainty. I was oppressed and disheartened when I found that the quest for it was futile. I was trying to reach land, the solid land of fixed and settled rules, the paradise of a justice that would declare itself by tokens plainer and more commanding than its pale and glimmering reflections in my own vacillating mind and conscience. (166) The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by. (168) The future . . . is yours. We have been called to do our parts in an ageless process. Long after I am dead and gone, and my little part in it is forgotten, you will be here to do your share, and to carry