From Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings,
by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the
crow makes piles of glittering pebbles. We gabble words
like parrots until we lose the sense of their meaning;
we chase after this new idea and that: we take an old
thought and dress it out in so many words that the thought
itself is lost in its clothing, like a slim woman in a
barrel skirt, and then we exclaim, "Lo, the wonderful
new thought I have found!"

"There is nothing new under the sun," says the proverb.
I think the meaning is that there are just so many truths
or laws of life, and no matter how far we may think we
have advanced, we cannot get beyond those laws. However
complex a structure we build of living, we must come back
to those truths, and so we find we have traveled in a circle.