Will Durant

born in 1885 AD; died in 1981 AD (age ~96)

historian of civilization


Quotes (Authored)

The manuscript has been written three times, and each rewriting has discovered errors. Many must still remain; the improvement of the part is sacrificed to the completion of the whole.

"If anyone," [Julian the Apostate] wrote to Eumenius, "has persuaded you that there is anything more profitable to the human race than to pursue philosophy at one's leisure without interruptions, he is a deluded man trying to delude you."

  • Will Durant, Julian the Apostate

    • No religion can hope to win and move the common soul unless it clothes its moral doctrine in a splendor of marvel, legend, and ritual.

    Slavery was slowly declining. In a developed civilization nothing can equal the free man's varying wage, salary, or profit as an economic stimulus. Slave labor had paid only when slaves were abundant and cheap.

    A religion is, among other things, a mode of moral government. The historian does not ask if a theology is true—through what omniscience might he judge? Rather he inquires what social and psychological factors combined to produce the religion; how well it accomplished the purpose of turning beasts into men, savages into citizens, and empty hearts into hopeful courage and minds at peace; how much freedom it still left to the mental development of mankind; and what was its influence in history.

    Judaism, Christianity, and Islam assumed that the first necessity for a healthy society is belief in the moral government of the universe—belief that even in the heyday of evil some beneficent intelligence, however unintelligibly, guides the cosmic drama to a just and noble end. The three religions that helped to form the medieval mind agreed that this cosmic intelligence is one supreme God; Christianity added, however, that the one God appears in three distinct persons; Judaism and Islam considered this a disguised polytheism, and proclaimed with passionate emphasis the unity and singleness of God.

    Morals are in part a function of climate.

    The virtues of a saint may be the ruin of a ruler.

    Civilization is the union of soil and soul—the resources of the earth transformed by the desire and discipline of men.

    Next to bread and woman, in the hierarchy of desire, comes eternal salvation; when the stomach is satisfied, and lust is spent, man spares a little time for God.

    Mohammed, like Moses, used religion as a means to hygiene as well as to morality, on the general principle that the rational can secure popular acceptance only in the form of the mystical.

    Pious pagan Arabs, long before Mohammed, had trekked to the Kaaba. Mohammed accepted the old custom because he knew that ritual is less easily changed than belief.

    All religions are superstitions to other faiths.

    Men being by nature unequal in intelligence and scruple, democracy must at best be relative.

    In communities with poor communication and limited schooling some form of oligarchy is inevitable.

    War and democracy are enemies.

    Civilization is rural in base but urban in form; men must gather in cities to provide for one another audiences and stimuli.

    As al-Tabari makes no attempt to co-ordinate the diverse traditions into a sustained and unified narrative his history remains a mountain of industry rather than a work of art.

    Men loved life while maligning it, and spent great sums to stave off death.

    In a society where government, law, and morality are bound up with a religious creed, any attack on that creed is viewed as menacing the foundations of social order itself.

    A scientist completes himself only through philosophy.

    Those who can worship God in spiritual love, entertaining neither hope nor fear, are the highest of mankind; but they will reveal this attitude only to their maturest students, not to the multitude.

    Only lunatics can be completely original.

    There is nothing so foolish but it may be found in the pages of the philosophers.

    At their peak philosophy and religion meet in the sense and contemplation of universal unity.

    Civilized comfort attracts barbarian conquest.

    Nothing, save bread, is so precious to mankind as its religious beliefs; for man lives not by bread alone, but also by the faith that lets him hope. Therefore his deepest hatred greets those who challenge his sustenance or his creed.

    [Charlemagne] rarely entertained, preferring to hear music or the reading of a book while he ate. Like every great man he valued time; he gave audiences and heard cases in the morning while dressing and putting on his shoes.

  • about Charlemagne

    • Moralists are bad historians.

    Boys reached the age of work at twelve, and legal maturity at sixteen.

    Christian ethics followed, with adolescents, a policy of silence about sex: financial maturity—the ability to support a family—came later than biological maturity—the ability to reproduce; sexual education might aggravate the pains of continence in this interval; and the Church required premarital continence as an aid to conjugal fidelity, social order, and public health. Nonetheless, by the age of sixteen the medieval youth had probably sampled a variety of sexual experiences.

    State and Church alike accepted as valid marriage a consummated union accompanied by the exchange of a verbal pledge between the participants, without other ceremony legal or ecclesiastical.

    In every age the laws and moral precepts of the nations have struggled to discourage the inveterate dishonesty of mankind.

    Men were no better in the Age of Faith than in our age of doubt, [and in] all ages law and morality have barely succeeded in maintaining social order against the innate individualism of men never intended by nature to be law-abiding citizens.

    Patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty is a tool of mass greed and crime.

    Obstinate patience... is half of genius.

      Even perfection becomes oppressive when it will not change.

        In 813 al-Khwarizmi used the Hindu numerals in his astronomical tables; about 825 he issued a treatise known in its Latin form as Algoritmi de numero Indorum—"al-Khwarizmi on the Numerals of the Indians"; in time algorithm or algorism came to mean any arithmetical system based on the decimal notation. In 976 Muhammad ibn Ahmad, in his Keys of the Sciences, remarked that if, in a calculation, no number appears in the place of tens, a little circle should be used "to keep the rows." This circle the Moslems called sifr, "empty" whence our cipher; Latin scholars transformed sifr into zephyrum, which the Italians shortened to zero.

        Al-Khwarizmi contributed effectively to five sciences: he wrote on the Hindu numerals; compiled astronomical tables which, as revised in Moslem Spain, were for centuries standard among astronomers from Cordova to Chang-an; formulated the oldest trigonometric tables known; collaborated with sixty-nine other scholars in drawing up for al-Mamun a geographical encyclopedia; and in his Calculation of Integration and Equation gave analytical and geometric solutions of quadratic equations.

        Day by day the religion that some philosophers supposed to be the product of priests is formed and re-formed by the needs, sentiment, and imagination of the people; and the monotheism of the prophets becomes the polytheism of the populace.

        We—who have less leisure than men had before so many labor-saving devices were invented—cannot spare the time to read...

        Art is significance rendered with feeling through form; but the feeling must accept discipline, and the form must have structure and meaning, even if the meaning outreach the realm of words.

        Every conquest creates a new frontier, which, being exposed to danger, suggests further conquest.

        Nothing fails like success.

        Statesmen who organize successful wars, just or unjust, are exalted by both contemporaries and posterity.

        The ardor that destroys is seldom mated with the patience that builds.

        The good, the true, and the beautiful fluctuate with the fortunes of war.

        A bribe always leaves a balance to be paid on demand.

        The poor welcomed [Yusuf], always preferring new masters to old.

        Where all is ornament the eye and soul grow weary even of beauty and skill.

        Sa'di was a philosopher, but he forfeited the name by writing intelligibly.

        Thinking is a perilous enterprise, except in silence.

        The West lost the Crusades, but won the war of creeds. Every Christian warrior was expelled from the Holy Land of Judaism and Christianity; but Islam, bled by its tardy victory, and ravaged by Mongols, fell in turn into a Dark Age of obscurantism and poverty; while the beaten West, matured by its effort and forgetting its defeat, learned avidly from its enemy, lifted cathedrals into the sky, wandered out on the high seas of reason, transformed its crude new languages into Dante, Chaucer, and Villon, and moved with high spirit into the Renaissance.

        The continuity of history reasserts itself: despite earthquakes, epidemics, famines, eruptive migrations, and catastrophic wars, the essential processes of civilization are not lost; some younger culture takes them up, snatches them from the conflagration, carries them on imitatively, then creatively, until fresh youth and spirit can enter the race. As men are members of one another, and generations are moments in a family line, so civilizations are units in a larger whole whose name is history; they are stages in the life of man. Civilization is polygenic—it is the co-operative product of many people, ranks, and faiths; and no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed. Therefore the scholar [...] accords his grateful homage to any people that has borne the torch and enriched his heritage.

        Men can be held together only by doing things together.

        Perhaps [the Jewish aristocracy] was too keenly conscious of its superiority, but it redeemed its pride by its sense that good birth and fortune are an obligation to generosity and excellence.

        The Jews, like the Christians, used excommunication too frequently, so that in both faiths it lost its terror and effectiveness.

        The frequent use of Jews in high financial office suggests that their Christian employers had confidence in their integrity. Of violent crimes—murder, robbery, rape—the Jews were seldom guilty. Drunkenness was rarer among them in Christian than in Moslem lands.

        Their sex life, despite a background of polygamy, was remarkably wholesome. They were less given to pederasty than other peoples of Eastern origin.

        The young husband, merged with his wife in work, joy, and tribulation, developed a profound attachment for her as part of his larger self; he became a father, and the children growing up around him stimulated his reserve energies and engaged his deepest loyalties.

        The Jew, with the vanity of the commonplace, prided himself on his reproductive ability and his children; his most solemn oath was taken by laying his hand upon the testes of the man receiving the pledge; hence the word testimony.

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

        In every age the soul of the Jew has been torn between the resolve to make his way in a hostile world, and his hunger for the goods of the mind. A Jewish merchant is a dead scholar; he envies and generously honors the man who, escaping the fever of wealth, pursues in peace the love of learning and the mirage of wisdom.

        The isles of science and philosophy are everywhere washed by mystic seas. Intellect narrows hope, and only the fortunate can bear it gladly.

        It is the unfortunate who must believe that God has chosen them for His own.

        It is almost a Newtonian law of history that large agricultural holdings, in proportion to their mass and nearness, attract smaller holdings, and, by purchase or otherwise, periodically gather the land into great estates; in time the concentration becomes explosive, the soil is redivided by taxation or revolution, and concentration is resumed.

        This ample transmission of the Greek heritage was at once stimulating and restrictive. It sharpened and widened thought, and lured it from its old round of homiletical eloquence and theological debate. But its very wealth discouraged originality; it is easier for the ignorant than for the learned to be original.

        Michael Psellus (1018?-80) was a man of the world and the court, an adviser of kings and queens, a genial and orthodox Voltaire who could be brilliant on every subject, but landed on terra firma after every theological argument or palace revolution. He did not let his love of books dull his love of life.

        The clans may have owned property in common in their early pastoral stage; but the growth of agriculture—in which different degrees of energy and ability, on diverse soils, produced unequal results—generated private or family property.

        The old libraries were scattered or destroyed, and intellectual life was almost confined to the Church. Science succumbed to the superstition that gives romance to poverty. Only medicine kept its head up, clinging with monastic hands to the Galenic heritage.

        Theodulf, Bishop of Orléans, organized schools in every parish of his diocese, welcomed all children to them, and forbade the priest instructors to take any fees; this is the first instance in history of free and general education.

        Every extended frontier of empire or knowledge opens up new problems.

        Literary prose comes later than poetry in all literatures, as intellect matures long after fancy blooms; men talk prose for centuries "without knowing it," before they have leisure or vanity to mold it into art.

        Men wear out rapidly in war or government.

        Life's brevity forbids the enumeration of gods or kings.

        Time sanctions error as well as theft.

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

        The monks of Italy and France had erred in imitating the solitary asceticism of the East; both the climate and the active spirit of Western Europe made such a regimen discouragingly difficult, and led to many relapses.

        [Pope Gregory] left behind him books of popular theology so rich in nonsense that one wonders whether the great administrator believed what he wrote, or merely wrote what he thought it well for simple and sinful souls to believe.

      • about Pope Gregory I

        • Few were the Christians who took seriously the notion that the world would end in the year 1000... There is no evidence of any panic of fear in the year 1000, nor even of any rise in gifts to the Church.

        It is reserved to the philosopher, and forbidden to the man of action, to see elements of justice in the position of his enemy.

        Feudalism was the economic subjection and military allegiance of a man to a superior in return for economic organization and military protection.

        Slavery on church lands and papal estates continued till the eleventh century. Canon law sometimes estimated the wealth of church lands in slaves rather than in money;

        The decline of slavery was due not to moral progress but to economic change. Production under direct physical compulsion proved less profitable or convenient than production under the stimulus of acquisitive desire. Servitude continued, and the word servus served for both slave and serf; but in time it became the word serf, as villein became villain, and Slav became slave. It was the serf, not the slave, who made the bread of the medieval world.

        Like most economic and political systems in history, feudalism was what it had to be to meet the necessities of place and time and the nature of man.

        Under every system of economy men who can manage men manage men who can only manage things.

        Halfway on his long journey from 753 to 9 B.C., Livy thought of stopping, on the ground that he had already won lasting fame; he went on, he says, because he found himself restless when he ceased to write.

      • about Livy

        • History has been unfair to this "age of despots" because it has spoken here chiefly through the most brilliant and most prejudiced of historians.

        The emperors themselves were the chief victims of their power... Seven of these ten men met a violent end; nearly all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy, dishonesty, and intrigue, trying to govern a world from the anarchy of home. They indulged their appetites because they knew how brief was their omnipotence; they lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death. They went under because they were above the law; they became less than men because power had made them gods.

        The public never forgave these teachers of wisdom from taking salaries or fees.

        The first lesson of philosophy is that we cannot be wise about everything. We are fragments in infinity and moments in eternity; for such forked atoms to describe the universe, or the Supreme Being, must make the planets tremble with mirth.

        Read good books many times, rather than many books; travel slowly, and not too much.

      • Will Durant, Seneca the Younger

        • Rome itself had only two large factories—a paper mill and a dyeing establishment; probably neither meals nor fuels were at hand in quantity, and the profits of politics seemed more honorable than the proceeds of industry.

        Italian life was now (A.D. 96) as highly industrialized as life was ever to be until the nineteenth century. It would hardly go further on the basis of slavery and a high concentration of wealth. Roman law contracepted large organizations by requiring every sharer in an industrial undertaking to be a legally responsible partner; it forbade "limited liability" companies and allowed joint-stock corporations only for the performance of governmental contracts. Since similar restrictions affected banks, these could seldom provide capital for large-scale enterprise.

        Slaves were still sufficiently available to discourage the development of machinery; listless slave labor, with small stake in the product, was not likely to make inventions; some labor-saving devices were rejected because they might have caused technological unemployment; and the purchasing power of the people was too low to stimulate or support mechanized production.

        Even in the age of the despots there were Romans of the old type, men of ability and integrity, conscientious administrators who made the Empire prosper under the lords of misrule and opened a way for monarchy's golden age.

        The products of art appeal to the soul through eye or ear or hand rather than through the intellect; their beauty fades when it is diluted into ideas and words. The universe of thought is only one of many worlds; each sense has its own; each art has therefore its characteristic medium, which cannot be translated into speech. Even an artist writes about art in vain.

        [Julian the Apostate] loved philosophy too much to be dissuaded from it by the conduct of philosophers.

      • about Julian the Apostate

        • Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of men and the inhibitions of a moral code. The instincts without the inhibitions would end civilization; the inhibitions without the instincts would end life. The problem of morality is to adjust inhibitions to protect civilization without enfeebling life.

        A moral code bitterly uncongenial to the flesh must bear the seal of a supernatural origin if it is to be obeyed; it must carry a divine sanction and prestige that will be respected by the soul in the absence of any force, and in the most secret moments and coverts of life.

        Theologies and philosophies, like men and states, are what they are because in their time and place they have to be.

        Woman had domesticated the sheep, the dog, the ass, and the pig; now she domesticated man. Man is woman's last domestic animal, only partially and reluctantly civilized.

        Individuals became civilized when they were made secure by membership in an effectively protective communal group; states will become civilized when they are made secure by loyal membership in an effectively protective federated group.

        Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation.

        Wisdom can never be transmitted by words, only by example and experience.

        The first principle of good government is good example.

        Revolution, like death and style, is the removal of rubbish, the surgery of the superfluous; it comes when many things are ready to die.

        Only the Second World War made India politically free.

        The bow had many forms: it might be a simple short bow, drawn at the breast; or a longbow aimed from the eye and ear; or a crossbow, in which the cord, drawn taut in the groove of a stock, was suddenly released, sometimes by a trigger, and propelled a missile of iron or stone. The crossbow was old; the longbow was first prominently used by Edward I (1272–1307) in his wars with the Welsh.

      • about Edward I

        • Feudal war differed from both ancient and modern war in greater frequency and less mortality and cost.

        Romantic love—i.e., love that idealizes its object—has probably occurred in every age, in degree loosely corresponding with the delay and obstacles between desire and fulfillment. Until our own age it was rarely the cause of marriage... In most ages, and above all in feudalism, women married men for their property, and admired other men for their charm.

        The knight agreed with the poet that knightly love had to be for some other lady than his own wife, usually for the wife of another knight.

        Women, too, were not all romantic; but from the twelfth century it became a convention with many of them that a lady should have a lover, Platonic or Byronic, added to her husband.

        Man in the jungle or hunting stage had to be greedy—to seek food eagerly and gorge himself zealously—because, when food came, he could not be sure when it would come again. He had to be sexually sensitive, often promiscuous, because a high death rate compelled a high birth rate; every woman had to be made a mother whenever possible, and the function of the make was to always be in heat. He had to be pugnacious, ever ready to fight for food or mate. Vices were once virtues, indispensable to survival.

        comparative religion does religion no good

        Albert loved knowledge, and admired Aristotle this side of heresy.

      • about Aristotle, Albertus Magnus

        • There is a heavy ballast of nonsense in his system, as in all philosophies that do not agree with our own

      • about Thomas Aquinas

        • Perhaps we err in thinking of him as a philosopher; he himself honestly called his work theology; he made no pretense to follow reason wherever it should lead him; he confessed to starting with his conclusions; and though most philosophers do this, most denounce it as treason to philosophy.

      • about Thomas Aquinas

        • He did not succeed in reconciling Aristotle and Christianity, but in the effort he won an epochal victory for reason. He had led reason as a captive into the citadel of faith; but in his triumph he had brought the Age of Faith to an end.

      • about Thomas Aquinas

        • The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of soul and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

        The historian is miserably subject to the brevity of time and human patience, and must dishonor with a line men who were immortal for a day, but now lie hidden between the peaks of history.

        Science and philosophy, in the medieval West, had to grow up in such an atmosphere of myth, legend, miracle, omens, demons, prodigies, magic, astrology, divination, and sorcery as comes only in ages of chaos and fear.

        Boethius, about 525, mentioned the abacus as enabling one to count by tens; but this invitation to a decimal system was ignored. The merchants of Italy used the abacus, but wrote the results in clumsy Roman numerals.

      • about Boethius

        • [Leonardo Fibonacci] learned to reckon, he tells us, "by a marvelous method through the nine figures of the Indians"; here at the outset of their European career the new numerals were properly called Hindu, and what is now a bore and chore of our childhood was then a wonder and delight.

      • about Leonardo Fibonacci

        • Despite his epoch-making work, the new method of calculation was long resisted by the merchants of Europe; many of them to finger the abacus and write the results with Roman numerals; as late as 1299 the abacists of Florence had a law passed against the use of "new-fangled figures."

      • about Leonardo Fibonacci

        • Every city of any importance paid physicians to treat the poor without charge. Some cities had a measure of socialized medicine.

        The fertility of women labors to atone for the stupidity of men and the bravery of generals.

        ...undoubting Thomas...

      • about Thomas Aquinas

        • In the history of man—so multiple is he and diverse—one mood may survive in some souls and places long after its successor or opposite has risen in other minds or states.

        The Middle Ages are a condition as well as a period: in Western Europe we should close them with Columbus; in Russia they continued until Peter the Great (d. 1725); in India till our time.

      • about Peter the Great

        • The boundary between "medieval" and "modern" is always advancing; and our age of coal and oil and sooty slums may some day be accounted medieval by an era of cleaner power and more gracious life.

        The men of the Middle Ages were the victims of barbarism, then the conquerors of barbarism, then the creators of a new civilization. It would be unwise to look down with hybritic pride upon a period that produced so many great men and women...

        The dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions only awaits opportunity or permission to oppress, kill, ravage, and destroy. In this sense modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism, which secretly remains; and in every generation civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority.

        Every generation is stirred by a kindred vision of an international moral order superior to the jungle ethics of sovereign states.

        Distance immobilizes motion, assimilates differences, and freezes change.

        Medieval thinkers... did not attach as much importance as the modern thoughtless to progress in means unaccompanied by improvement in ends.

        We shall never do justice to the Middle Ages until we see the Italian Renaissance not as their repudiation but as their fulfillment.

        In passing from the Age of Faith to the Renaissance we shall be advancing from the uncertain childhood to the lusty and exhilarating youth of a culture that married classic grace to barbaric strength, and transmitted to us, rejuvenated and enriched, that heritage of civilization to which we must always add, but which we must never let die.

        Lucan is fair to Caesar, and writes of him an illuminating phrase: nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum‚"thinking nothing done while anything remained to do."

      • by Will Durant, Lucan
      • about Julius Caesar

        • The movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar's day as at any time before the railway. In 54 B.C. Caesar's letter from Britain reached Cicero at Rome in twenty-nine days; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, required thirty days.

      • about Julius Caesar, Robert Peel, Marcus Tullus Cicero

        • We must not exaggerate the wealth of ancient Rome. The total annual revenue of the state under Vespasian was at most 1,500,000,000 sesterces ($150,000,000)—less than a fifth of the budget of New York City [in 1944]. The means of amassing great fortunes by large-scale production were unknown or ignored, and had not developed the immense and taxable industry and commerce of the modern world.

      • about Vespasian

        • Christian astronomers in the thirteenth century pictured the planets as revolving about the earth... the center and summit of the universe was that same man whom the theologians described as a miserable worm tainted with sin and mostly doomed to hell.

        It was ungracious of Rome to destroy so accommodating a philosopher.

      • about Paul

        • The emperor who condemned him died a coward's death, and soon nothing survived of his inordinate works. But from the defeated Paul came the theological structure of Christianity, as from Paul and Peter the astonishing organization of the Church. Paul had found a dream of Jewish eschatology, confined in Judaic Law; he had freed and broadened it into a faith that could move the world.

      • about Paul, Peter, Nero

        • Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter; Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.

      • about Paul, Peter, Jesus Christ