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

by Will Durant

Eating dead people, he thought, was less barbarous than torturing live ones.

Oh, mechanical victories, oh, base conquest!

how do we know that we shall never know?

He notes that he is a Christian by geographical accident; otherwise “I should rather have taken part with those who worshiped the sun.”

He was a freethinker with an allergy for martyrdom.

“After all, it is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them”

There is no use changing forms of government; the new one will be as bad as the old, because it will be administered by men.

Montaigne was the grandfather, as Bayle was the father, of the Enlightenment. Mme. du Deffand, the least deceived woman of her brilliant age, wished to “throw into the fire all the immense volumes of the philosophers except Montaigne, who is the father of them all.”

the gaya ciencia, the laughing learning, the allegro pensieroso, of this unsilenceable gossiper.

He was not made for burning. He knew that he too might be wrong; he was the apostle of moderation as well as of reason; and he was too much of a gentleman to set his neighbor’s house on fire before he had any other shelter to give him.

hiding himself in himself till they passed by.

each age, to relish itself, must denounce and reverse the past.

Good writing must breathe well and must be welcome to the ear;

On his deathbed (1628), he roused himself from his final stupor to reprove his nurse for using incorrect French.129

“every woman is to my taste,”

rivaling Horace in form and Juvenal in vinegar,

worn out with melodious lechery.

the highest art is art impregnated with philosophy.

The dramatic is by definition exceptional; dramas would be ruined if they impartially described reality; they rise to art if, by ignoring the irrelevant and selecting the significant, they can deepen us with a fuller understanding of life.

When, later, someone asked him how he had reached mastery, he answered, “I neglected nothing.”

but their Catholicism was of the humane humanist kind preached by Erasmus a half-century back and generally practiced in Renaissance Rome

The young prince had graces of person as well as of purse.

He died December 12, 1582, having lived a year on milk and half a century on blood.

Internal concord varies inversely with external peace.

But man’s ferocity is intermittent, his resilience endures.

Only failure wears out a man faster than success.

Truth,” we perceive, is a function and vassal of time.

for maps, like faces, are the signatures of history.

it had not yet learned how clever it is to be small.

He had a reputation for silence, but to say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

“She cannot bear the idea of marriage, because she was born free and will die free,”

When he tried to convince her that all animals are mechanisms, she remarked that she had never seen her watch give birth to baby watches.

One is, in proportion as one can love. Fools are to be more feared than knaves. To undeceive men is to offend them. Extraordinary merit is a crime never forgiven. There is a star which unites souls of the first order, though ages and distances divide them.

More courage is required for marriage than for war. One rises above all, when one no longer esteems or fears anything. He who loses his temper with the world has learned all he knows to no purpose. Philosophy neither changes men nor corrects men.23

in the depths of doubt mysticism may sink its well.

Belief is a protective garment; its complete divestiture leaves an intellectual nudity that longs to be clothed and warmed.

When he had ceased to trouble her, Poland recognized him as one of her greatest kings.

a cannon shot his ashes to the winds to discourage further resurrections.

the butcher and the prince

The people, having saved the state, humbly returned it to the nobility.

the Holy Roman Empire, though, as Voltaire said, it was none of these,

“Though elevated above others by our dignity and birth, we ought not to forget that we are allied to the rest of mankind by our weaknesses and defects.”

“Valete et inebriamini” (Be well and get drunk).

A temperance society struggled against the evil, but its first president died of drink.

but in history, as in journalism, virtue makes no news—

The first Christmas tree in recorded history was part of a celebration in Germany in 1605; it was the Germans who surrounded the Feast of the Nativity with picturesque relics of their pagan past.

seeking choirs and bread;

To understand this “theological rabies” we must remember that all parties to the dispute agreed that the Bible was the infallible word of God, and that life after death should be the main concern of life.

A mind unsympathetic to mysticism will find only a whirlwind of absurdities

RELIGIONS are born and may die, but superstition is immortal. Only the fortunate can take life without mythology.