Quotes from Will Durant

Nevertheless, the movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar's day as at any time before the railway. In 54 B.C.. Caesar's letter from Britain reached Cicero at Rome in twenty-nine days; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, required thirty days.20

but he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth

In books we converse with the wise, as in action with fools. That is, if we know how to select our books. Some books are to be tasted, reads a famous passage, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.

Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters—like shoe-making—we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.

but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.

Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

The fear of death is strangely mingled with the longing for repose.

In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

Spinoza is not to be read, he is to be studied; you must approach him as you would approach Euclid, recognizing that in these brief two hundred pages a man has written down his lifetime's thought with stoic sculptury of everything superfluous.

When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.

Pascal: "When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.

coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

When a simpleton abused him, Buddha listened in silence; but when the man had finished, Buddha asked him: "Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?" The man answered: "To him who offered it." "My son," said Buddha, "I decline to accept your abuse, and request you to keep it for yourself

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.

Pessimism is a sign of decay, optimism is a sign of superficiality; tragic optimism is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience, even at the cost of woe, and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life.

Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation. Is

Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.

Democritus (460-360 B.C.)— in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.

I thank God," he used to say, "that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of