Fallen Leaves Quotes

“The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait!—“If youth knew how, and old age could!”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Let ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“When I introspect I perceive not merely sensations and ideas but desire, will, ambition, and pride as vital phases of me. Spinoza was right: “desiderium ipsa essentia hominis”—desire is the very essence of man. We are living flames of desire until we admit final defeat. Will is desire expressed in ideas that become actions unless impeded by contrary or substitute desires and ideas. Character is the sum of our desires, fears, propensities, habits, abilities, and ideas.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“A man is as young as the risks he takes.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“The fear of death is strangely mingled with the longing for repose.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“I have tried to keep some hold on the religion of my youth by interpreting its basic doctrines as symbols that gave popular expression to philosophic truths. I can rephrase “original sin” as man’s inherited disposition to follow those instincts of pugnacity, sexual promiscuity, and greed which may have been necessary in the hunting stage of human history, but which need a variety of controls in an organized society that guarantees its members protection against violence, theft, and rape; we are born with the taint of ancestral passions in our blood.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“we must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves”
― Will Durant, Ariel Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“When my children enter college I trust that education will open to them many paths toward the understanding of life. “May my son study history,” said Napoleon at St. Helena, “for it is the only true philosophy, and the only true psychology.” Psychology is largely a theory of human behavior, philosophy is too often an ideal of human behavior, and history is occasionally a record of human behavior. We cannot trust all the historians, for sometimes, like Akbar’s, they were engaged by their heroes and gave them all the virtues and the victories. But no man is educated, or fit for statesmanship, who cannot see his time in the perspective of the past. Every lad and lass should begin, in high school, an orderly recapitulation of the pageant of history; not, as we used to do, with Greece and Rome, which were the old age of the ancient world, but with Mesopotamia and Egypt and Crete, from which civilization flowed over into Greece and Rome, and through them to Northern Europe and ourselves.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“The world is not “my idea,” as Schopenhauer called it; it is a stern reality of which you and I are passing spawns.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with their children, with parental care that will make their children a little finer than themselves. Life wins.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageable, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates. No mechanistic account or materialistic philosophy can do it justice, or understand the silent growth and majesty of a tree, or compass the longing and laughter of children.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Every philosopher should be an athlete. If he is not, let us suspect his philosophy.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“These steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope--these lofty city spires or simple chapels in the hills--they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know, but as long as men suffer, those steeples will remain”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“What is wisdom? It is an application of experience to present problems, a view of the part in the light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“We recall Macaulay’s warning that democracy would collapse when the poor used their electoral power to rob rich Peter to pay lazy Paul. Polybius expressed the same idea in 130 BC: When,”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy;”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Vanity increases with age.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“It implies a recognition by the individual that his life, liberty, and development depend upon social organization, and his willingness, in return, to adjust himself to the needs of the community.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Suddenly all our civilization seems threatened by crime, war, racial strife, moral experiments, and urban decay. We pass these frightening problems on to our children, themselves so rootless and confused. If we can sustain our faith in education we may, by guiding the rising generations—white, black, and brown together—through school and college, generate the intelligence to meet these dangers, and to lift our lives to humane tolerance, orderly liberty, marital constancy, and an organized peace. CHAPTER TWELVE ON RACE On the social aspect of this issue I should almost be an expert, for in a minor way I have been involved in the civil rights movement”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“But something of the skepticism that injured my religious faith has overflowed into timid doubts of science”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Darwin furthered the transformation. As the astronomer had lost the Earth in space, the biologist lost man in the infinity of time, in the long procession of transitory species that had walked the earth or swum the sea or flown the air; man became a mere line in Nature’s interminable odyssey. But it was Darwin, too, who opened a way to what John Morley called “the next great task of science—to create a new religion for humanity.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Desire, not experience, is the essence of life; experience becomes the tool of desire in the enlightenment of mind and the pursuit of ends.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

“Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous.”
― Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God