The Age of Faith Quotes

“War does one good—it teaches people geography.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“He who leaves his home in search of knowledge walks in the path of God … and the ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr”;”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. Plato”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“He says to his wife, in the early years of their marriage: “Let us live always as we live now, and let us not abandon the names that we have given each other in our first love. … You and I must always remain young, and you shall always be beautiful to me. We must keep no count of the years.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Let us live always as we live now, and let us not abandon the names that we have given each other in our first love. … You and I must always remain young, and you shall always be beautiful to me. We must keep no count of the years.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“the royal revenue was doubled from 600 to 1200 livres ($240,000) a day. In his reign the façade of Notre Dame was completed, and the Louvre was built as a fortress to guard the Seine.62 When Philip died (1223) the France of today had been born.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Edward I (1272–1307) was less a scholar than his father, and more a king; ambitious, strong of will, tenacious in war, subtle in policy, rich in stratagems and spoils, yet capable of moderation and caution, and of farseeing purposes that made his reign one of the most successful in English history. He reorganized the army, trained a large force of archers in the use of the longbow, and established a national militia by ordering every able-bodied Englishman to possess, and learn the use of, arms; unwittingly, he created a military basis for democracy.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“We have not fully recovered from the Dark Ages: the insecurity that excites greed, the fear that fosters cruelty, the poverty that breeds filth and ignorance, the filth that generates disease, the ignorance that begets credulity, superstition, occultism—these still survive amongst us; and 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. The”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Saints, unknown to early Islam, became numerous in Sufism. One of the earliest was a woman, Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra (717-801). Sold as a slave in youth, she was freed because her master saw a radiance above her head while she prayed. Refusing marriage, she lived a life of self-denial and charity. Asked if she hated Satan, she answered, "My love for God.1eaves me no room for hating Satan." Tradition ascribes to her a famous Sufi saying: "0 God! Give to Thine enemies whatever Thou hast assigned to me of this world's goods, and to Thy friends whatever Thou hast assigned to me in the life to come; for Thou Thyself art sufficient for me.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Giraldus Cambrensis tells of a youth who, at his father’s painful expense, studied philosophy for five years at Paris, and, returning home, proved to his father, by remorseless logic, that the six eggs on the table were twelve; whereupon the father ate the six eggs that he could see, and left the others for his son.148”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“now that the policeman labors to take the place of God, it becomes more dangerous to question the state than to doubt the Church. No system smiles upon the challenging of its axioms.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“History is a duel between art and time.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“The highways of the Middle Ages, however discouraging, were alive with curious and hopeful people who thought that they would be happier somewhere else.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Cleanliness was next to money,”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“He scorned historians, who perform no great deed themselves, but receive honors for recording the great deeds of others.44”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Francis saw no advantage in secular knowledge except for the accumulation of wealth or the pursuit of power;”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“civilized comfort attracts barbarian conquest.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“You and I must always remain young, and you shall always be beautiful to me. We must keep no count of the years.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“the fine or composition-money for killing a king was 30,000 thrimsas ($13,000);”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“but trial by combat was unknown.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Toward 1175 rich veins of copper, silver, and gold were found in the Erz Gebirge (i.e., ore mountains); Freiberg, Goslar, and Annaberg became the centers of a medieval “gold rush”; and from the little town of Joachimsthal came the word joachimsthaler—meaning coins mined there—and, by inevitable shortening, the German and English words thaler and dollar.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“In Europe the Age of Faith reached its last full flower in Dante; it suffered a vital wound from Occam’s “razor” in the fourteenth century; but it lingered, ailing, till the advent of Bruno and Galileo, Descartes and Spinoza, Bacon and Hobbes; it may return if the Age of Reason achieves catastrophe”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“EVERY age is an age of romance, for men cannot live by bread alone, and imagination is the staff of life.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“when everybody owns everything nobody takes care of anything.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“The proper operation of man is to understand.”106”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Oxford man considered it sufficient punishment for an Oxford murderer to be compelled to go to Cambridge.72”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“great art is the child of a triumphant faith.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“the color symphonies of the great cathedrals;”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“the historian disintegrates for convenience’ sake the elements of a civilization whose components flowed as a united stream.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith