Quotes from Will Durant

Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and "men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Self Government by extravagance and incompetence brings its own end.

Today there is a place called Egypt, but the Egyptian people are not masters there; long since they have been broken by conquest, and merged in language and marriage with their Arab conquerors; their cities know only the authority of Moslems and Englishmen, and the feet of weary pilgrims who travel thousands of miles to find that the Pyramids are merely heaps of stones.

Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.

Men look to love and life for everything; they receive a little less than that; they imagine that they have received nothing: these are the three stages of the pessimist.

Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.

The only thing unqualifiedly good in this world is a good will - the will to follow the moral law, regardless of profit or loss for ourselves. Never mind your happiness; do your duty. Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness. Let us seek the happiness in others; but for ourselves, perfection - whether it bring us happiness or pain.

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.

For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.

Pagan professors of philosophy, after the death of Hypatia, sought security in Athens, where non-Christian teaching was still relatively and innocuously free. Student life was still lively there, and enjoyed most of the consolations of higher education—fraternities, distinctive garbs, hazing, and a general hilarity.

To bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm: That is the top of sovereignty.

He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skilful general who marshals his limited forces with all the strategy of war . . . . He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.

For he who can foresee with his mind is by nature intended to be lord and master; and he who can work only with his body is by nature a slave. The slave is to the master what the body is to the mind.

The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objective ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake to beautify things.

Since there was no Heaven in ancient Jewish theology,231 virtue had to be rewarded here or never.

emotions as a rule are in excess, and detain the mind in the contemplation of one object so that it cannot think of others."93 But "desire that arises from pleasure or pain which has reference to one or certain parts of the body has no advantage to man as a whole."94 To be ourselves we must complete ourselves.

Silence is the beginning of wisdom.

passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead.

To be a philosopher," said Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; "these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions";50 we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit:

He does not admire the merely contemplative life; like Goethe he scorns knowledge that does not lead to action: men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators.

Prudens quæstio dimidium scientiæ—to know what to ask is already to know half.

the Alexandrian Library was a tragedy of some moment, for it was believed to contain the complete published works of Æschylus, Sophocles, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, and a hundred others, who have come down to us in mangled form; full texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who survive only in snatches; and thousands of volumes of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman history, science, literature, and philosophy.

For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead.