Quotes from Will Durant

An ancient critic spoke of him as "moderate to excess.

It is memory that classifies and interprets sensations into perceptions, and perceptions into ideas; but memory is an accretion. That unity of the mind which Kant thinks native (the "transcendental unity of apperception") is acquired—and not by all; and can be lost as well as won—in amnesia, or alternating personality, or insanity. Concepts are an achievement, not a gift.

Alexander himself, in the hour of his triumph, was conquered by the soul of the East; he married (among several ladies) the daughter of Darius; he adopted the Persian diadem and robe of state; he introduced into Europe the Oriental notion of the divine right of kings; and at last he astonished a sceptic Greece by announcing, in magnificent Eastern style, that he was a god. Greece laughed; and Alexander drank himself to death.

Spinoza was right: "in so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect it participates in eternity."127

the development of the Christian ethic slowly eroded Christian theology. Christ destroyed Jehovah.

No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia";

One must pay a penalty for having a prejudice against obscurity.

A man is as young as the risks he takes.

Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.

The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth.

The lazy will always attribute genius to some 'inspiration' that comes for mere waiting.

The average person found himself forced to choose between a scientific priesthood mumbling unintelligible pessimism, and a theological priesthood mumbling incredible hopes. ?In this situation

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free. Some

Let ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.

in calling other human beings "savage" or "barbarous" we may be expressing no objective fact, but only our fierce fondness for ourselves, and our timid shyness in the presence of alien ways.

His only occupation is to contemplate the essence of things; and since he himself is the essence of all things, the form of all forms, his sole employment is the contemplation of himself. 40 Poor Aristotelian God!—

Nor may we define progress in terms of happiness, for idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but greatness.

life means for us constantly to transform into light and flame all that we are or meet with";1

In such cases the motives of the (usually hidden) leaders may be economic, but the result is largely determined by the passions of the mass.

Let us provisionally define progress as "increasing control of the environment by life," and let us mean by environment "all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of desire." Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.

Voltaire might say, "I have no scepter, but I have a pen.

all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

When science has sufficiently ferreted out the forms of things, the world will be merely the raw material of whatever utopia man may decide to make.

As long as there is poverty there will be gods."32