★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
In 208 eloquent pages, Durant shares his views on death, religion, education, war, politics, spirituality, and, through it all, the meaning of life. Truly a gift to humanity from a scholar who devoted his long life to the study of history.
Highlights
Youth is as confident and improvident as a god. It loves excitement and adventure more than food. It loves the superlative, the exaggerated, the limitless, because it has abounding energy and frets to liberate its strength. It loves new and dangerous things; a man is as young as the risks he takes. (Page 16)
a man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas. (Page 28)
I believe that in everything there is some formative force like that which I call soul. So I echo Spinoza again: omnia quodammodo animata — all things are in some way animated even if it is only the dance of electrons in an apparently lifeless stone. (Page 36)
We are all drops of water trying to analyze the sea. (Page 44)
The word moral, of course, is from the Latin mos, moris, meaning “custom”; we may agree that what at a given time or place is considered moral will depend upon the mores, customs, or standards prevailing in the group. Personally I should define morality as the consistency of private conduct with public interest as understood by the group. It implies a recognition by the individual that his life, liberty, and development depend upon social organization, and his willingness, in return, to adjust himself to the needs of the community. (Page 59)
That education is of most worth which opens to the body and the soul, to the citizen and the state, the fullest possibilities of their harmonious life. Three basic goods should determine education and define its goals: First, the control of life, through health, character, intelligence, and technology; second, the enjoyment of life, through friendship, nature, literature, and art; and, third, the understanding of life, through history, science, religion, and philosophy. (Page 139)
Education is the perfecting of life —the enrichment of the individual by the heritage of the race. Let this vital process of transmission and absorption be interrupted for half a century, and civilization would end; our grandchildren would be more primitive than savages. (Page 139)
If life leaves him leisure for speculation, he may return to these men, grapple with them in a fierce resolve to master them, and work his way through the unsettlement of every belief to some plateau of clearer insight, of more modest aspiration and gentler doubt. Perhaps in that unimpeded air he will see all philosophies as but one groping, all faiths as but a single hope; it will not be in his heart to fight of them any longer, or to refuse the fellowship of his mind to any honest creed; a great sympathy for all the dreams of men, a loving understanding of all their harassed ways, will widen and deepen him, and he will know the peace and simplicity, the tolerance and catholicity, of the sage. (Page 153)
But there is another way in which to view history; history as man’s rise from savagery to civilization—history as the record of the lasting contributions made to man’s knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills—history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments in economics, religion, literature, science, and government-history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future-that kind of history is not “bunk”; it is, as Napoleon said on St. Helena, “the only true philosophy and the only true psychology.” Other studies may tell us how we might behave, or how we should behave; history tells us how we have behaved for six thousand years. (Page 157)
I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, and athletic teams-but how, without history, can we understand these events, discriminate their significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable hopes? (Page 158)
“History,” said Lord Bolingbroke, quoting Thucydides, “is philosophy teaching by examples.” And so it is. It is a vast laboratory, using the world for its workshop, man for its material, and records for its experience. A wise man can learn from other men’s experience; a fool cannot learn even from his own. History is other men’s experience, in countless number through many centuries. By adding some particles of that moving picture to our vision we may multiply our lives and double our understanding. (Page 158)
Civilization is a fragile bungalow precariously poised on a live volcano of barbarism. (Page 161)
Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever. Here is history, a futile circle of infinite repetition: these youths with eager eyes will make the same errors as we, they will be misled by the same dreams; they will suffer, and wonder, and surrender, and old.