Quotes from Will Durant

La historia ha justificado a la Iglesia en la creencia de que las masas de la humanidad desean una religión pródiga en milagros, misterio y mitos.

For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

to the best account; it is an unintelligent waste of strength.

All this national decay, all this weakening of the state, this obviously imminent subjection of Judah to Babylon, were, it seemed to Jeremiah, Yahveh's hand laid upon the Jews in punishment for their sins.

Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.

struck him as a favorable contrast with his own nation that there was no slavery in India;II and that though the population was divided into castes according to occupations, it accepted these divisions as natural and tolerable

If Cleopatra's nose, said Pascal, had been an inch longer or shorter, all history would have been changed.

for every deliberate death there are thousands of indeliberate births.

the doctrine better formulated than by Plato himself in another dialogue, Gorgias (483 f), where the Sophist Callicles denounces morality as an invention of the weak to neutralize the strength of the strong.

Saint-Lambert, it is all for thee The flower grows; The rose's thorns are all for me; For thee the rose.

fought their duels on Greek territory, conscripted Greek men, requisitioned Greek crops and gold, levied twenty years' taxes in two, and left the cities destitute.

Ars longa, vita brevis—art is long and time is fleeting: this is the tragedy of every great soul.

But "in a more divided state of society," where the division of labor into unequally important functions elicits and enlarges the natural inequality of men, communism breaks down because it provides no adequate incentive for the exertion of superior abilities.

Law is necessary because men are subject to passions; if all men were reasonable, law would be superfluous.

On his desk, when he died, there lay a paper on which he had written his last, and perhaps his most characteristic, sentences: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given. Farewell.

Of what are you thinking?" Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. "I do not have to think," was the answer; "I have plenty of meat." Not to think unless we have to—there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom.

We suffocate with uncoordinated facts; our minds are overwhelmed with science breeding and multiplying into specialistic chaos for want of synthetic thought and a unifying philosophy. We are all mere fragments of what a man might be.

Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically[.]

Woman is to man as the slave to the master, the manual to the mental worker, the barbarian to the Greek. Woman is an unfinished man, left standing on a lower step in the scale of development.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

Obey even the unjust law, answers Spinoza, if reasonable protest and discussions are allowed and speech is left free to secure a peaceful change.

God preserve me from my friends," he concluded; "I will take care of my enemies myself.

custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group.

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed[.]