The Life of Greece Quotes

“Water is the usual drink, but everyone has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or stimulants.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“كان البطالمة لا يترددون في تقديم أية مساعدة يحتاجها علماء الطب، فلم يكونوا يجيزون تشريح الحيوانات وجثث الموتى من الآدميين فحسب، بل كانوا يرسلون بعض المجرمين المحكوم عليهم بالإعدام لتشرح أجسامهم وهم أحياء. وبفضل هذا التشجيع أصبح التشريح الآدمي علماً”
― Will Durant, حياة اليونان

“Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words for cultural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured for good or evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks. All the problems that disturb us today—the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the emancipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of politics and the perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural supports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of the rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and communism, between the East and the West—all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own. We shall try to see the life of Greece both in the mutual interplay of its cultural elements, and in the immense five-act drama of its rise and fall. We shall begin with Crete and its lately resurrected civilization, because apparently from Crete, as well as from Asia, came that prehistoric culture of Mycenae”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“The profoundest defect of the system is its negativity”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“The basic principle of democracy is freedom inviting chaos; the basic principle of monarchy is power inviting tyranny, revolution, and war.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“It is plain, then, that those states are best instituted wherein the middle classes are a larger and more formidable part than either the rich or the poor.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“The most fortunate of men is he who combines a measure of prosperity with scholarship, research, or contemplation; such a man comes closest to the life of the gods.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“No civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume II

“The class war had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“They will think of Greece as the bright morning of that Western civilization which, with all its kindred faults, is our nourishment and our life.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Civilization does not die, it migrates; it changes its habitat and its dress, but it lives on.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“it provides an excellent design for bachelorhood, but hardly for a society.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“The only certain propositions in philosophy are that pleasure is good, and that pain is bad.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Virtue, in this philosophy, is not an end in itself, it is only an indispensable means to a happy life.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“if knowledge does not come from the senses, where else can it come from?”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“the soundest education and training for a life of active politics is the study of history”;”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“We shall not follow the record of his wars, for though there is drama in the details of strife, there is a dreary eternity in its causes and results; such history becomes a menial attendance upon the vicissitudes of power, in which victories and defeats cancel one another into a resounding zero.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Virtue is not an act but a habit of doing the right thing.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“wealth is merely means; it does not of itself satisfy anyone but the miser; and since it is relative, it seldom satisfies a man long.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“What can one do with Demosthenes?” his secretary complained. “Everything that he has thought of for a whole year is thrown into confusion by one woman in one night.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“In the earlier stages of a nation’s history there is little thought; action flourishes; men are direct, uninhibited, frankly pugnacious and sexual”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Men shall know there is no God, no light In heaven, if wrong to the end shall conquer right. . . .”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“In Heracles and Alcestis the mighty son of Zeus and Alcmena is described as a good-natured drunkard, with the appetite of Gargantua and the brains of Louis XVI.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Even for the feeble it is an easy thing to shake a city to its foundation, but it is a sore struggle to set it in its place again.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Idealism offends the senses, materialism offends the soul; the one explains everything but the world, the other everything but life.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“There is no chance; chance is a fiction invented to disguise our ignorance.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“If we wish to understand the Greeks as against the Romans we must think of the French vs. the English; if we wish to feel the Spartan spirit as opposed to the Athenian we must think of the Germans vs. the French.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“To the Greek the best life is the fullest one, rich in health, strength, beauty, passion, means, adventure, and thought.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece