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Cultivate your garden Do not depend upon teachers to educate you follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. "Happiness," said Chamfort, "is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.
Will Durant -
Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the bankers know that history is inflationary.
Will Durant
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Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.
Will Durant -
Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
Will Durant -
Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
Will Durant -
A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Will Durant -
Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.
Will Durant -
In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant
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Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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 -
For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
Will Durant -
A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
Will Durant -
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant -
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant
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History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.
Will Durant -
Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.
Will Durant -
Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag. The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order.
Will Durant -
The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.
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 -
If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
Will Durant
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Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
Will Durant -
Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
Will Durant -
Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals.
Will Durant -
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
Will Durant