The Age of Louis XIV: The Story of Civilization, Volume VIII

by Will Durant

after centuries of argument we suspect that there is some truth in every passion, something to be loved in every foe.

But his satires still live, for no one has equaled them in etching characters in acid scorn.

“that laborious, that invidious, that closely watched slavery which is mocked with the name of power.”

In 1678 she published Oroonoko, the story of a Negro “royal slave” and his beloved Imoinda.

Defoe’s training in literary deception had lifted him out of journalism into art.

These substantial volumes were intended as potboilers to provide food for his family; but, by the man’s power of imagination and fluency of style, they became literature.

“the bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as thinking.”

“I shall be like that tree: I shall die at the top.”

No noisome Whiffs or sweating Streams Before, behind, above, below Could from her taintless body flow.

The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it; and if I could compass that design without hurting my own person or fortune, I would be the most indefatigable writer you have ever seen . . . When you think of the world, give it one lash the more at my request. 1 have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is towards individuals . . . I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Councillor Such-a-one and Judge Such-a-one; so with physicians (I will not speak of my own trade), soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man—although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.

HISTORY is a fragment of biology—the human moment in the pageant of species. It is also a child of geography—the operation of land and sea and air, and of their forms and products, upon human desire and destiny.

But geography and commerce laugh at treaties.

Every victory breeds new enemies or inflames old ones.

Peter was so anxious to Westernize Russia that he dragged it, so to speak, to the Baltic and bade it look through his “window on the West.”

As the Dnieper had made Russia Byzantine and the Volga had made it Asiatic, so now the Neva would invite it to be European.

The women were likewise urged to adopt Western costume; they resisted less than the men, for in dress women are annual revolutionists.

A Russian proverb said that Christ himself would steal if his hands were not tied to the Cross.

whose names would be as well known to English-speaking peoples as those of Wren and Inigo Jones, were it not for the prison of frontiers and the babel of tongues.

History is a race between art and war.

only to preserve the faith that made a heroic poem from the prose of toil.

Perhaps no institution so vast in its scope and tasks can be kept clear of the faults inherent in the nature of man.

we perceive again that the nature of man is the same in the oppressor and the oppressed, and that the people are the chief source of the evils that surround them.

“must be led to the temple,” he said, “not dragged

fond Italy tells as many legends about her artists as about her saints.

buying costly jewels as a safe investment, since everything would change but human vanity.

She observed none of the rules.”

not all the empire of the world, she said, would reconcile her to matrimony.

THE survival of the Jews through nineteen centuries of hardship and revenge is a somber strain in the history of ignorance, hatred, courage, and resilience.

There were spots on this sun.

In general the higher clergy and classes were inclined to toleration, but the lower clergy and the masses were easily stirred to the ecstasy of hate.

“Where civil liberty is entire, it includes liberty of conscience; where liberty of conscience is entire . . . , a man, according to the dictates of his own conscience, may have the full exercise of his religion, without impediment to his preferment or employment in the state.”

The attempt to educate character without the aid of religion is still in the experimental stage.

“No man was ever written out of reputation but by himself.”

Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration; some words go off and become obsolete; others are taken in and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense and notion, which in tract of time makes as observable a change in the air and features of a language as age makes in the lines and mien of a face. All are sensible of this in their own native tongues, where continual use makes every man a critic. For what Englishman does not think himself able, from the very turn and fashion of the style, to distinguish a fresh English composition from another a hundred years old? Now, there are as real and sensible differences in the several ages of Greek. . ., but very few are so versed and practised in that language as ever to arrive at that subtlety of taste.

“A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”

hope,” he wrote to Huygens, “that in time all nations, even the less civilized, will embrace each other as dear comrades, and will join forces, both intellectual and material, to banish ignorance

“Nature plays the mathematician,” said Boyle; and Leibniz added, “Natural science is naught but applied mathematics.”

Calculus meant originally a small stone used by the ancient Romans in calculating;

Invito patre sidera verso—“Against my father’s will I study the stars”—

So, year by year, and mind by mind, the impenetrable immensity surrenders some teasing, luring fragment of its mystery.

In his brief career Swammerdam founded modern entomology, and established himself as one of the most accurate observers in the history of science. His return from science to religion personified the hesitation of modern man between a search for truth that smiles at hope and a retreat to hopes that shy from truth.

Only the fear of a theological earthquake kept biology from anticipating Darwin in the seventeenth century.

The debate will go on until the part understands the whole.

this cosmos allowed no miracles, therefore answered no prayers, therefore needed no God.

In any case men could not but see that the sciences were increasing human knowledge while religions quarreled and statesmen warred.

Everything was progressing except man.

monk of science.

He was a compound of mathematics and imagination, and no one can understand him who does not possess both.

He had no itch to print.

as my quiet to run after a shadow.”