★★★★★ | History | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
The tenth volume of the incredible Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant. This one, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, provides an immensely readable history of Europe leading up to the French Revolution. Reading this series has been such an education. My only wish is that I had read them sooner.
Highlights
Luxury, profligacy, and slavery have been in all ages the scourge of the efforts of our pride to emerge from that happy state of ignorance in which the wisdom of Providence has placed us. … Let men learn for once that nature would have preserved them from science as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child. — Rousseau
Rousseau had expressed a problem that appears in every advanced society. Are the fruits of technology worth the haste, strains, sights, noises, and smells of an industrialized life? Does enlightenment undermine morality? Is it wise to follow science to mutual destruction, and philosophy to disillusionment with every fortifying hope?
“In this age of quarrels and remonstrances there is happiness only in living the philosophic life among one’s books and friends.” — Turgot
There is nothing so often condemned, and so deeply loved, as the past.
“Almost nothing great has ever been done in the world except by the genius and firmness of a single man combating the prejudices of the multitude.” — Voltaire in praise of monarchy. (Location 4050) Government
“What is called wit is sometimes a startling comparison, sometimes a delicate allusion; or it may be a play upon words—you use a word in one sense, knowing that your interlocutor will [at first] understand it in another. Or it is a sly way of bringing into juxtaposition ideas not usually considered in association…. It is the art of finding a link between two dissimilars, or a difference between two similars. It is the art of saying half of what you mean and leaving the rest to the imagination. And I would tell you much more about it if I had more of it myself.” — Voltaire
The question of God’s existence is beyond solution by reason. We may choose between belief and unbelief; and why reject an inspiring and consolatory faith? — Rousseau
Rousseau’s Social Contract: An agreement of individuals to subordinate their judgment, rights, and powers to the needs and judgment of their community as a whole. Each person implicitly enters into such a contract by accepting the protection of the communal laws. The sovereign power in any state lies not in any ruler—individual or corporate—but in the general will of the community; and that sovereignty, though it may be delegated in part and for a time, can never be surrendered.
“Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem redieris” (Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return). (Location 6383) mortality
Mozart could play almost any music at sight, because he had seen certain combinations and sequences of notes so often that he could read them as one note, and his habituated fingers played them as one musical phrase or idea, just as a practiced reader takes in a line as if it were a word, or a paragraph as if it were a line. Mozart’s trained memory was allied with this capacity to perceive aggregates, to feel the logic that compelled the part to indicate the whole.
Goethe himself made sketches of what he especially wished to recall. He tried his hand at sculpture, and modeled a head of Hercules. He admitted that he had no talent for the plastic arts, but he felt that these experiments gave him a better sense of form, and helped him to visualize what he wished to describe.
“Contemplating a library, one feels as though in the presence of vast capital silently yielding incalculable interest.” — Goethe
“Pleasant it is, when the winds are troubling the waters in a mighty sea, to witness from the land another’s great toil; not because it is a delight to behold anyone’s tribulation, but because it is sweet to see from what evils you yourself are free.” — Lucretius
“The business of government is to promote the happiness of society.” — Bentham
Said Adam Smith, toward 1770: “It is not uncommon, I have been told, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive.”