...dogs and other philosophers...

One of the gifts of both Mrs ERJ and I being retired is we can read books aloud to each other.  She reads a couple of pages, then I read a couple of pages.

We are currently working our way through Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd.  We knock out a couple of chapters a night.  It is not the easiest book to read aloud.  Many of the sentences are long and stuffed with adjectives.  His turn-of-phrase is often strange to those of us who read mostly short, linear sentences.

One phrase caught my fancy:

George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

Does it get any better than "...dogs and other philosophers..."?