The Reformation Quotes

“And, after speech, it provided a readier instrument for the dissemination of nonsense than the world has ever known until our time.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“How futile are words before a work of art! Each art successfully resists translation into any other medium; it has its own inalienable quality, which must speak for itself or not at all.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Live now, believe me, wait not for tomorrow; gather the roses of life that bloom today!”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“The names of even the “immortals” are writ in water.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Civilization is a parasite on the man with the hoe.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“History begins after origins have disappeared.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Order was more important than liberty.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Protestantism was nationalism extended to religion.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“I eat like a Bohemian and drink like a German, thank God, Amen.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Ulrich von Hutten distinguished four classes of robbers: merchants, jurists, priests, and knights, and judged the merchants to be the greatest robbers of them all.14”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“He had not only the natural egoism or selfishness of all men, but also that secret and cherished egotism, or selfconceit, without which the writer or artist would be crushed in the ruthless rush of an indifferent world.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“The curriculum stressed the catechism, the Creed, the basic prayers, reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, and flogging.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“The world is supported by four things: the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the good, and the valor of the brave.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Erasmus, in the ecstasy of his sales, called printing the greatest of all discoveries, but perhaps he underestimated speech, fire, the wheel, agriculture, writing, law, even the lowly common noun.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Order is the mother of civilization and liberty; chaos is the midwife of dictatorship; therefore history may now and then say a good word for kings.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“He considers it nature’s unforgivable sin to ravish us with loveliness and then dissolve it in our arms.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“The women stand out with more credit than the kings in history, and fight bravely a desperate battle to civilize the men.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“If religion had not existed, the great legislators—Hammurabi, Moses, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius—would have invented it. They did not have to, for it arises spontaneously and repeatedly from the needs and hopes of men.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“All those fascinating varieties of terrain—mountains and valleys, fiords and straits, gulfs and streams—that make Europe a panorama of diverse delight, have broken the population of a minor continent into a score of peoples cherishing their differences, and self-imprisoned in their heritage of hate.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Science gives man ever greater powers but less significance. It gives him better tools with less purposes. It is silent on origins, values, and ultimate aims. It gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by time and death.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation

“The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Nemesis here worked leisurely, lengthening the revenge of the gods from clean or sudden death to prolonged and ignominious decay.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“It was a cruel age, and its laws corresponded to a pitiless economy, a shameful pauperism, a somber art, and a theology whose God had repudiated Christ.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Every empire passes through successive phases. (1) A victorious nomad tribe settles down to enjoy its conquest of a terrain or state. “The least civilized peoples make the most extensive conquests.”71 (2) As social relations become more complex, a more concentrated authority is required for the maintenance of order; the tribal chieftain becomes king. (3) In this settled order wealth grows, cities multiply, education and literature develop, the arts find patrons, science and philosophy lift their heads. Advanced urbanization and comfortable wealth mark the beginning of decay. (4) The enriched society comes to prefer pleasure, luxury, and ease to enterprise, risk, or war; religion loses its hold on human imagination or belief; morals deteriorate, pederasty grows; the martial virtues and pursuits decline; mercenaries are hired to defend the society; these lack the ardor of patriotism or religious faith; the poorly defended wealth invites attack by the hungry, seething millions beyond the frontiers. (5) External attack, or internal intrigue, or both together, overthrow the state.72”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“Empires are sustained by the solidarity of the people, and this can be best secured through the inculcation and practice of the same religion;”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“he continued his studies until “I found at last that I knew something”54—a characteristic delusion of youth.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“History is in some aspects an alternation of contrasting themes: the moods and forms of one age are repudiated by the next,”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“his intellect was keen enough to see good reasons for every course in every crisis;”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

“he married, at sixty-eight, a pretty woman of twenty-seven, and survived even this trial.”
― Will Durant, The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI