The Story of Civilization, Vol-2, The Life of Greece by Will Durant
“Humanity, patient under every cataclysm, renews its hope, takes courage, and builds once more.”
“It is as difficult to begin a civilization without robbery as it is to maintain it without slaves.”
“...the family is the lasting unit, surviving perhaps for centuries, and forging in the turbulent crucible of the home the order and character without which all government is in vain.”
“custom is the jealous older brother of law.”
“Art (to vary Aristotle) may make even terror beautiful—and so purify it—by giving it significance and form.”
“...war was their business, by which they made what seemed to them an honest living”
“The past would be startled if it could see itself in the pages of historians.”
“The gods are mortal, but piety is everlasting.”
“Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war”
“liberty and equality are not associates but enemies”
“The concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal.”
“the indifference of the public is the ruin of the state.”
“...habits of order and law which are to a society what the bony structure is to an animal—its shape and strength, though not its creative life.”
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
“...that subtle and precarious luxury called civilization, without which life would have no beauty, and history no meaning.”
“a man’s vices (or errors) are common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own.”
“wisdom is a harbinger of death.”
“Greece respected wisdom as India respected holiness, as Renaissance Italy respected artistic genius, as young America naturally respects economic enterprise.”
“The heroes of Greece were not saints, or artists, or millionaires, but sages; and her most honored sages were not theorists but men who had made their wisdom function actively in the world.”
“the most unfortunate of men is he who has not learned how to bear misfortune”
“men ought to order their lives as if they were fated to live both a long and a short time”
“wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession.”
“For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest”.
“When you are traveling abroad look not back at your own borders”; prejudices should be checked at every port of entry.
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