The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time Quotes

“The illustrious ancients,when they wished to make clear and to propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. If”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“It was woman who gave man agriculture and the home; she domesticated man as she domesticated the sheep and the pig.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Stricken down with consumption in 1819, Keats, after weeks in bed, wrote to Fanny Brawne: “Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake, I have found thoughts obtrude upon me.‘If I should die,’ said I to myself,‘I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’” “If I had had time”—this is the tragedy of all great men. Keats never wrote anything of importance after that; nevertheless, his friends are remembered because of him, and he has left behind him poems as immortal as English, and more perfect than Shakespeare.We”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“the decline of religious belief,which has all sorts of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions—”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Perhaps Tarde and James are right, and all history is a succession of inventions made by genius and turned into conventions by the people, a series of initiatives taken by adventurous leaders and spread among the masses of mankind by the waves of imitation.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Let us provisionally define progress as “increasing control of the environment by life,” and let us mean by environment “all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of desire.” Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Nor may we define progress in terms of happiness, for idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but greatness.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“The greatest fortune of a people would be to keep ignorant persons from public office, and secure their wisest men to rule them.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Voltaire might say, “I have no scepter, but I have a pen.”
― Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time