Will Durant - The Story of Civilization (1931)

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The discipline of desire is the backbone of character.

Will Durant
The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.

Will Durant
Magic begins in superstition and ends in science.

Will Durant
Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.

Will Durant
It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.

Will Durant
Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition, and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

Will Durant
Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

Will Durant
From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Will Durant
The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.

Will Durant
History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.

Will Durant
The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

Will Durant
Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

Will Durant
Astrology antedated — and perhaps will survive — astronomy; simple souls are more interested in telling futures than in telling time.

Will Durant
Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.

Will Durant
An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

Will Durant
The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty in the slogans of the strong means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.

Will Durant
Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.

Will Durant
Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.

Will Durant
The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

Will Durant
There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.

Will Durant
Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.

Will Durant
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Will Durant
There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.

Will Durant
I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.

Will Durant
Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

Will Durant
Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.

Will Durant
That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.

Will Durant
I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.

Will Durant
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

Will Durant