The Age of Reason Begins: The Story of Civilization, Volume VII

by Will Durant

Poverty, not wealth, was a sin; it revealed lack of personal character and divine grace.29

“Quod Seldenus nescit nemo scit”—What Selden does not know, nobody knows.

we respect the enthusiasm more than the judgment.

But even perfection palls when it is long continued. Change is necessary to life, sensation, and thought; an exciting novelty may seem by its very novelty to be beautiful, until the forgotten old returns on the wheel of time and is embraced as young and new.

Art became the expression of feeling through ornament, not the compression of thought into form.

History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules. History is baroque.

but history, like oratory, seldom makes a point without exaggeration.

In history we must chercher not la femme but le banquier.

There was something noble in this insanity. It was as if the nation felt that unless its faith were true, life would be a meaningless absurdity.

21 but an indignant man makes a poor historian.

He had done the best he could with an intelligence too cramped by education, too narrow for his empire, too inflexible for his diverse responsibilities. We cannot know that his faith was false; we only feel that it was bigoted and cruel, like almost all the faiths of the age, and that it darkened his mind and his people while it consoled their poverty and supported his pride.

It was unpatriotic of the Moriscos to avoid wine and eat so little meat; in this way the burden of the taxes on these commodities fell almost wholly upon the Spanish Christians.

Spain forgave him his mistresses for his plays.

The characters are seldom studied intimately, and one might say of these dramas what Thoreau said of newspapers—that if you merely change the names and dates, the contents are always the same.

in Spain, as in Islam, the man of letters has often realized his secret dream of being a man of deeds.

How permanent and real are the vicissitudes and victories of life? Or are they surface illusions, maya, part of the veil that hides the basic, lasting reality?

Fame is a fashion. We tire of wearing old admirations on our pens, and find it exhilarating to discard worn idols from our fancy, to take down the dead mighty from their seats, and to put on the praises of new gods, blown up by our originality or exhumed by some fresh renown. There is no telling how great Velázquez will seem when the vanes of taste veer again.

Commissioned by the royal auditor in Granada to model a statue of St. Anthony of Padua, he finished it to the satisfaction of the official, who, however, haggled about the price. Cano asked one hundred doubloons ($3,200?). “How many days has it taken you?” the official asked. “Twenty-five,” said Cano. “Then,” said the auditor, “you esteem your labor at four doubloons a day?” “You are a bad accountant, for I have been fifty years learning to make such a statue as this in twenty-five days.”

Adjustment to a changing environment is the essence of life, and its price.

AS long as he fears or remembers insecurity, man is a competitive animal. Groups, classes, nations, and races similarly insecure compete as covetously as their constituent individuals, and more violently, as knowing less law and having less protection; Nature calls all living things to the fray.

she was a typical Medici, with government in her heritage and subtlety in her blood.

Who, after all, he asked, knows what is heresy and what is truth? “You say your religion is the better; I say mine is; is it any more reasonable that I should adopt your opinion than that you should adopt mine?

Royal absolutism, which was the cause of civil war in England, was the effect of civil war in France.

“Lord, I am not worthy,” Henry replied, “I know it quite well, but my nephew asked me to appoint you.”

All the forests in my kingdom would not provide enough gibbets if all who have written or preached against me were to be hanged.”

he could no longer be Lothario and Alexander in one.

take the Magdalen as her model and England as her penance.

dressed to the height of taxation.

Mme. de Sévigné told of a pregnant lady who indulged in it so immoderately that she gave birth to a charming little blackamoor—un petit garçon noir comme le diable.17

it was from Italy that the salon—like the violin, the château, ballet, opera, and syphilis—came to France.

despite losing two sons to death and three daughters to religion,

Temperance in everything, even in temperance.

Next to travel, the best education is history, which is travel extended into the past.

“Because it was he, because it was I”33—because they were so different that they completed each other.

“I was so accustomed to be ever two, and so inured to be never single, that methinks I am but half myself.”

absurd that nature “hath pell-mell lodged our joys and filths together.”

The form of it is round, and hath no flat side but what serveth for my table and chair; in which … manner at one look it offers me the full sight of all my books … There is my seat, there is my throne. I endeavor to make my rule therein absolute, and to sequester that only corner from the community of wife, of children, and of acquaintance.

A man must sequester and recover himself from himself … We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves … altogether ours … wherein we may hoard up and establish our true liberty. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know how to be his own.

He looks like scissors and paste, and tastes like ambrosia.

“I speak to paper,” he said, “as I do to the first person I meet.”

“I look within myself; I have no business but with myself; I incessantly consider … and taste myself.”

He pretends to most of the vices, and assures us that if there is any virtue in him it entered by stealth.

We forgive his faults because we share them. And we find his self-analysis fascinating because we know that it is about us that the tale is told.

“nothing can be said so absurd but that it has been said by one of the philosophers.”

The only sin that he recognized was excess. “Intemperance is the pestilence which killeth pleasure; temperance is not the flail of pleasure, it is the seasoning thereof.”

“O senseless man, who cannot make a worm and yet will make gods by the dozen!”67

“There is no science,” only the proud hypotheses of immodest minds.

“a persuasion of certainty is a manifest testimony of foolishness.”

“Men are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves.”

Conscience is the discomfort we feel when violating the mores of our tribe.